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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today’s episode, let’s learn how to use annotations in Preview. So, Preview has been around for many versions of Mac OS X. With Snow Leopard, it picks up the ability for you to add annotations to documents. Let’s go and take a look at how that works.
So, hear we are in Preview and I’ve opened up a PDF file; actually a chapter from the new book. In here I can click on this button that says “annotate”. That will bring up this little list of items here at the bottom that you can use to mark up the document. So, for instance, we could go ahead and select some text, like that, and do several things with it, like highlight it. We could also strike it thru, if we select it again and choose strike thru. We can also do and underline. So that’s pretty much the three simplest things we can do.
Okay, we can also draw a little bit on the document. So, we click on either an arrow, an oval or a rectangle- here, let’s try the arrow- and what we get here is the ability to draw and arrow from one point to the next. We can do the same thing with the circle and the rectangle. Once you’ve done them you can go ahead and move them around the screen, you can grab the edges and adjust where they go, and you can select one like I’ve done now and just hit the delete key to remove it.
Now, we can adjust the line width and the color by selecting these little menus here. They’ll just drop off the screen here but I can actually see a list of colors; I’ll choose green, and I’ll choose a new line width and when I draw on the screen, I’ll get something a little different. Now, you can also draw a box of text by clicking on this tool, drawing a line like that ad then typing in. And the same thing here, I could choose different colors, I could choose a different width and I could also click here and it would bring up the text panel, which then I can go ahead and change a lot of qualities of the text.
Another thing you can do it select something here and you can go ahead and create a link. Click here, and you get this dialogue here, and go ahead and decide that you want it to be a link within the PDF to somewhere else or you can decide that you want it to be a URL to link to. You can also go and define just an area of the document to link. So go to link there, move this out of the way, and then you can go ahead and basically define a rectangle like that. That helps if there’s images or specific lay outs and you want to have an areas that’s link rather than text.
The more traditional thing to do with annotations is to add notes. So you can do that by clicking on the note button down here. Once you have that selected you can basically click anywhere in here to put a little note; like right here above this text. Once I do that, it expands the area and I have a little note on the left. I can go ahead and leave in the information that’s there and add to it. And I can add more notes simply b clicking somewhere else. I get another note there to the left as well. I can add as many notes as I want and while I’ve got the note tool selected, I can even drag them around on the screen.
With these here I can change the color of the note. I can go ahead by clicking one of these and then selecting a new color from this menu here. Red, to distinguish which note goes where if you have a lot of them in the document.
Now of course if you save your PDF document in Preview, these notes will ba saved with it so after you mark something up, you can then pass it along to a colleague and they will see all your notes and can make their own changes as well.
Now these notes even work in things that aren’t PDF files. Here is a .JPEG image and I can go ahead and click on annotate and you can see it’s an abbreviated menu at the bottom because there’s not quite as many things you can do; I can’t select text for instance. But, I can still go ahead and do some different things here. So, for instance, I can add a box to it and I can go ahead and a little bit of text to it as well. You’ve even got some choice here if you bring up the annotations panel. You can do that, by the way, by showing the inspector and clicking on the final item here over to the right, which is Annotations, and you can say “select this note” and change it’s icon. So, you can select several different things here, like say, for instance, “key”, to show a key. Or “help” to show a little help icon. You an of course change the color of this as well. f it’s a link you can set the link in this dialogue box. Weather it’s a destination inside the PDF or a destination to an external URL.
Now, you combine this powerful annotations feature in Preview with the fact that you can create a PDF file simply by printing something from a Mac application, and you have a great way to work with colleagues. You can go basically produce a document say in Pages or some other applications, print it out, send it to them. They can use Preview then to mark it up with notes and annotations and things like that, send it back to you and you can go ahead and look at the document and make the final changes on your own.
It’s kind of like working with paper except for someone physically having to be there for you to hand them the piece of paper for them to mark up, you can actually e-mail the document to them and they can send it back to you.
Hope you like this look at the annotations feature in Preview. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.