Things You Can Do With PDF Selections in Preview

hi this is gary with macmost.com let's look at how useful it is to copy and paste sections of a pdf from preview [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so in the preview app when you're viewing a pdf you can actually select a section of a page and copy it and then paste that in various other places this leads to all sorts of useful functionality for instance here i've got a colorful poster about washing your hands and there's all sorts of useful information and you may want to print the whole thing out and post it somewhere or maybe just a section of it here's a list right here that could be useful just all by itself so if i wanted to select and copy that i could do that one of two ways one is i can click here to turn on the markup tools then click here to make a selection and then click and drag a rectangle but i could do that without the markup tools by using tools and then rectangular selection and now i can do the same thing so as soon as i've selected an area let's say this now i can use command c or edit copy so now that i have just a copy of that section of the pdf i could do lots of things with it one thing i can do is simply go to file and then new from clipboard command n is the shortcut so a quick command c command n would get you to the same place this creates a new pdf document it's unsaved and it just has this section in it if i were to save this it would make for a much smaller pdf so i can save just the information i want out of a larger file but of course i could also go to print this if i want to and i'll print just the section of the document that i want one place where i've used this in the past is where you get tickets that you want to print fortunately most of the time now you can just use your phone for tickets to shows or airline tickets and things like that but if you have to print something out a lot of times you don't want to print all the extra information you just want the ticket itself so now you could go to rectangular selection you can select just that area command c to copy command n to create a new document and i've got this new document much more compact to save it somewhere and also to print it you could do other things with these copied selections for instance in the notes app you can easily paste that section of the pdf here into a note so instead of having to copy and paste maybe reformat things you can paste this in especially useful if there's some graphics involved as well as text you could also do it in an email message so if you want to send somebody some information but maybe not the entire pdf you can just paste that one section of the pdf in there it doesn't work quite as well in messages because it converts it to an image and you can see it doesn't quite get the entire message there just a part of it converted into a graphic you could paste this into documents as well for instance pages numbers keynote just about anything that will accept a pdf so here in pages i can just paste this in and you can see i get this graphic posted in here if i zoom in you can see it's definitely vector based here it's not an image so much higher quality than taking a screenshot of something and pasting it in this will print really nicely and scale really nicely so if you want to include a bit of information from a pdf inside of a document this is really handy now this could be also helpful in taking content from one document and putting it in the other so for instance on the keynote here i select all the elements here in this keynote slide i can certainly copy it and then paste it here inside of pages but you can see how it's all the different elements in here maybe i don't want that maybe i want kind of the finished product so i could go into keynote and instead go to print and then from print you may be familiar with the pdf option here but instead of pdf just say open in preview so instead of creating a file it opens it directly in preview it's unsaved so now i can go take a section of this and copy it then go into pages and paste it in and this is a single graphic it's high resolution so you can see i could zoom in on it there but there aren't the individual elements anymore this is particularly handy when going from numbers to pages because you've got something like a chart like this in numbers if i copy that and paste it into pages it's actually the chart data here which can be changed if i want to instead take a permanent version of this i can go to file and then print and then go to open in preview then do a rectangular selection choose the section i want like that copy go into pages and paste and now it's the finished thing here it's actually an embedded pdf that can't be changed but it can be scaled and it looks good and you can imagine how that's also useful to paste into something like an email message as well in fact this solves the problem in numbers where it's hard to print a section of a spreadsheet so here if i just want one section here i don't have a way to just select that part but if i do open in preview here and then rectangular selection select just the part that i want to print do copy and then command n for new from clipboard now i just have this in a document and i can print this to only print that section of the numbers document and remember you can get a pdf from just about anything as long as you can print it so you can go to a web page say like this one and maybe you see this information here and copying and pasting it is going to be kind of difficult so instead you could go to print then open in preview then select just the area that you want copy it and now you can paste that into say a note or another document or send it in an email or whatever you want so i hope this gets you thinking about various ways that you can use the preview app to grab just the section of a pdf and then save it paste it or print it in different ways [Music] if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 19,851

Keywords: mac preview, selecting part of a pdf, printing part of a pdf, copying part of a pdf, extracting part of a padf

Id: D23uwa7s1XI

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021