Thursday, November 01, 2007

Preview as a cropping device

Preview is the Apple Mac own PDF making machine. Most graphic and text files can be opened with Preview - just drag and drop them on the Preview icon in the Dock. If it's not there find it in Applications folder and drag to the Dock.

The value of this application is often overlooked by Mac users, perhaps because of its unassuming name.

Among many other uses Preview is good as a cropping device:

1. Open graphic file in Preview
2. Under Tools choose Select Tool
3. Drag the cross cursor over the part of the image to select what you want
4. Under Edit - copy
5. Open/go back to your Pages file and paste.


Then convert your Pages document to PDF. You may find it also helps to reduce the size of your files.

I've tried this workaround many times and find it easier and quicker than masking, especially when you have to deal with large format graphic files, from which you only need to use a small fragment.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:41 am

    Yep. This was the way I always used in Tiger; unfortunately the same with Leopard doesn't seem to work. It always pastes back the whole content and not the selected part. Any workaround?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry, not using Leopard yet. Let me know if you find one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:12 pm

    Unfortunately I posted the supposed bug to the Apple forums but no response yet. I hope Apple is reading. The only workaround at this very moment is to save every copied portion of the image to a .jpg or whatever format you prefer then inserting it into the Pages doc.

    ReplyDelete

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