Tips and Tricks for using Preview
PDF seems to have become the standard for online
distribution of publications, this is despite many obvious
limitations. In particular from the point of view of
chemists, any chemical structures no longer contain any
chemical information. This means that for instance you
can’t do a sub-structure search of PDF documents.
Whilst Adobe Reader is the usual
cross-platform viewer Apple provide there own PDF viewer
called Preview. Preview employs
Apple's implementation of Adobe's PDF specification, and
uses of Apple's Cocoa graphical user interface, Quartz
graphics layer, and QuickTime image codec. Originally
developed for the NEXT operating system it has been
improved and updated regularly by Apple.
There are now a number of applications for
reference management
but Preview
can be used as the reader for references and here are a
number of features that you might find useful.
Control click on the toolbar and you get a drop-down menu
that includes “Customize toolbar”, you can now drag often
used options to the toolbar. The annotate tool is available
only when viewing PDFs by default, but if you open an image
you can add the annotate tool so it is available for images
also.
By default you can have a
red rectangle or oval, however if you double click on the
shape a dialog box opens allowing you to change colour,
line thickness and make it a dashed line. If you insert a
“Note” annotation and then double click on the annotation
you can change the colour and the associated icon.
These annotations can be
saved with the file and can thus be shared with colleagues.
Disappointingly they are not indexed by Spotlight and so
can’t be used for searching. It is also possible to add
links within the document, these can either be links to
other pages within the document or links to external URLs.
The links only become active when you uncheck the “Edit
link annotations”.
You can also add markup
annotations to PDFs, either from the “Tools” menu or you
can add an icon to the toolbar as described above. Note
they are only available when you have highlighted some
text. With text selected the options are “highlight”,
“strikethrough” and “underline”. To remove them you have to
display the annotations in the sidebar and select the
desired annotation and then delete.
If you want to save a certain page for reference or are
half way through a long publication and want a break, you
can bookmark the page by pressing Command-D or by choosing
Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu, the link will then be
added to the Bookmarks menu. These Bookmarks are not saved
with the PDF file and won’t work if you move the file.
Interestingly you can also bookmark images that you use
often so you don't need to locate them first.
If you open a PDF and then select “Inspector” from the
“Tools” menu a floating windows opens offering a number of
extra options. The first tab gives information about the
document, the second allows you to add Spotlight keywords
to allow improved searching. The fourth tab gives a
selection of “crop and rotation” options, you can apply
these manipulations to individual pages or all pages. This
is very useful if a PDF includes a table that needs to be
rotated. All changes can be saved with the document.
If you have two or
more PDFs open it is possible to combine pages from
different PDF files by simply dragging and dropping
pages from the sidebar, you can also change the order
of pages by dragging the pages in the sidebar. This
can be useful if supplementary material is provided
with a publication, simply add the supplementary
information to the original document (use print to PDF
if the information is provided in other file formats).
Preview can also be used as an image viewer and can open a
wide variety of file formats (AI - Adobe Illustrator
Artwork files, BMP – Windows Bitmap files, DNG – Digital
Negative files, EPS – Encapsulated PostScript files, FPX –
FlashPix files, GIF – Graphics Interchange Format files,
HDR – High Dynamic Range Image files, JPEG 2000 – JPEG 2000
files, JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group files,
OpenEXR – OpenEXR files, PS – Adobe PostScript files (after
an automatic conversion to PDF), PSD – Adobe Photoshop
files. PICT – QuickDraw image files, PNG – Portable Network
Graphics files, PNTG – MacPaint Bitmap Graphic files, QTIF
– QuickTime image files, RAD – Radience Scene Description
files, RAW – Raw image files, SGI – Silicon Graphics Image
files, TGA – TARGA image files, TIF, TIFF – Tagged Image
File Format files, XBM – X BitMap files). One useful option
in the preferences is to “Open all images in one window”.
All the selected images are then visible in a single window
and you can browse through them as a slideshow, or you can
select all images (Command-A) and then one of the options
in the Print dialog box is to print multiple images per
page.
Alternatively you can
select a subset by pressing the command button when
selecting images. Images are usually in alphabetical order
(PDF in page number order) but the drop-down menu at the
bottom of the sidebar allows you to change the order.
Another feature worth exploring are the Automator actions
available, if you open Automator and select PDFs or Photos
(these were previously under Preview in Tiger) you can see
the ready made actions that are available.
In Applescripts section there is an
automator workflow to combine pdfs. this was written for
Mac OS 10.4 but should still work in 10.5. Whilst as
I’ve mentioned it is possible to drag and drop pages to
combine PDFs, the automator workflow would certainly be
preferable if you were seeking to combine a large number
of PDFs.