From Macworld today, four great tips for working with PDFs in Snow Leopard, paraphrased below:
1. E-Mail PDFs with one click
Many of us use the PDF button at the bottom of the Print dialogue box to save a document as a PDF. That’s a great trick available in Leopard. Another great trick is the Mail PDF choice under the same button. Choose Mail PDF and the PDF is created, your default email app is launched, a new message created and the PDF is attached. Enter an address, subject and a message and you’re done. Brilliant!
2. Save a page (or several) from a PDF
Ever wanted to send or save only one or a few pages from a long document? Easy… open the PDF in Preview, and make sure you can see the sidebar… click the Sidebar button on the Preview toolbar or press Command-Shift-D. You should see a thumbnail of each page of the document. If you don’t, click the second button from the left at the bottom of the sidebar or press Command-Option-2.
Find the page you want to save, and drag its thumbnail to the desktop or to a Finder window. If you want multiple pages, select them with Shift-clicking (adjacent pages) or Command-click (non-contiguous pages) and drag to your destination. The page(s) will be saved as PDF name(dragged).pdf.
3. Merge PDF pages
Ever had a number of small PDFs that would be much better in a single file? Easy! Open the PDFs in Preview, display the sidebar with thumbnails. Under Leopard, you could drag one PDF into place below another to add it to the file. In Snow Leopard, tho, there’s a new trick.
Drag the second PDF on top of the first one. This changes the display of the first PDF in the sidebar.
Click on the arrow button to “close” or “open” the PDF, toggleing between showing the first page and all the pages. This makes it easy to be sure you have the docs in the right order. When you do, press Command_S to save the document, or Command-Shift-S to save as a new document with a new name.
4. Read PDFs more easily on a laptop
A portrait-formatted PDF can be tough to read on a small laptop screen, particularly with multiple columns. Scrolling up and down to move from one column to the next is a real pain. Here’s a great trick: read them like a book.
In Preview, choose Tools -> Rotate Left or Rotate Right. Then hold the laptop like a book, with the screen in one hand, keyboard in the other. Flip the Laptop to choose the side you prefer for easy reading.
With Adobe Reader, choose View -> Rotate View -> Clockwise (or Counterclockwise) and press Command-L for full-screen mode. Then you aren’t distracted by menus or toolbars, flipping pages by pressing the spacebar, or moving back by pressing Shift-spacebar.
Thanks to Kirk McElhearn and Macworld.
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