Software

Do you use Apple’s Preview application for reading PDF documents? Did you know that Preview also includes some basic tools for editing images and PDF documents?

Here are some useful tips to access some of those 'hidden' features....

Open a photo in Preview.

• Click on the Zoom buttons on the toolbar to zoom in and out.
  
  
  
  
• Click and drag a selection box over a part of the photo, then use Cmd-K to crop the photo.
  
  
  
  
• Click on the Tools menu to:
  
  • Adjust colour;
  • Rotate left or right;
    
  • Flip vertically or horizontally.
    
    
    
    

Open a photo or a PDF document in Preview.

• Click on the Annotate button on the toolbar. You will see an additional row of tools appear at the bottom of the window.
  
  In an image file the toolbar will look like this:
  
  
  
  In a PDF document the toolbar will have some additional icons:
  
  
  
  
• Click on the Arrow icon to add an arrow to your document;
  
  
• The Oval and Rectangle icons can be used to add those shapes to your document;
  
  
• The Text box icon will let you add text to the document;
  
  • Clicking on the right-most icon (Aa) will display the Font panel, giving you options to change font size, typeface, and colour of text that you have added using the text tool.
    
    
• The Link icon gives you the option of linking text in the document to another page in the document (select this page in the thumbnails before clicking on the Link icon), or linking to a URL. Look for the pop-up menu in the Inspector that appears when you click on the Link icon;
  
  
• The yellow "A" will highlight selected text;
  
  
• The strikethrough and underline "A"s will apply those effects to selected text;
  
  
• The Colour menu and Line Width menu let you quickly change the colour and width of the lines of objects that you have added using the arrow, oval and rectangle tools;
  
  • Cmd-I will show the Inspector, which you can use to change other properties of each of these shapes, including adding fill colours.
    
    

Open a PDF document in Preview.

• If it is not already visible, click on the Sidebar button in the toolbar to display all the pages in the document.
  
  
  
• You can now delete pages from the sidebar view (using the Delete key), or drag pages from the sidebar of other PDF documents to add them to this document.
  
  

Once you have edited your image or PDF document, choose Save as... from the File menu to select from a variety of formats that you can use to save the document: