10 Reasons To Use Open In Preview Instead Of Save As PDF

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a better option than Print, Save as PDF on your Mac. 

Now experienced Mac users already know that you can create a PDF from almost anything as long as you can print from the app. If you go to File and then Print you're going to see a PDF button at the bottom of the Print Dialogue. This should appear in almost all apps. Even ones that don't have any other way to export as a PDF. So it is really handy to know. You can click on the little down arrow next to the word PDF to bring up a menu and there is Save As PDF. But you can also just click on the main part of the button here and then it allows you to Save As PDF. But there is a better option right above Save As PDF. 

It is the option Open In Preview. Now if your goal is to save a PDF you may not think to choose this. But it actually gives you way more flexibility than just saving the file. 

So first, it allows you to preview the PDF before it is ever saved. So if I select this you see it is going to open Preview up and then it creates a PDF and I can view it here. I can go through the thumbnails. If you don't see them you can select Thumbnails here and you can see the PDF, you can zoom in to see the quality, and check through everything so this could save you from saving a PDF, having to find it, open it up, check it, delete it if it is not right, and try again. You can simply use this method. 

If something is not quite right you can just click the red button or use Command W to Close and go back to your document here, change something, and then once again go to Print and then Open In Preview to check it out before saving it. 

Now this also works great if your goal is to Print. If your goal is to print you can use Open In Preview first, checkout the document, and then continue on inside of Preview, using File Print, to then Print from Preview. In fact, you may find some apps give you fewer options when printing directly from the app and you get more when you Open In Preview first and then print from the Preview App. 

Another thing you could do is check the size before you save the PDF. So, for instance, if I've got a document with lots of images in it I can go to File, Print or Command P and then Open In Preview. Without having to have created a file I can click the Info button right here and under the first tab I can see the file size. So if my goal is to get under some file size here I can check the file size of the PDF, close the Preview right there and then back and perhaps import smaller versions of the images or change other elements and try again until I get something small enough. 

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Now if your goal really is to have a PDF that you save you still may want to use the Open In Preview option. That allows you to check all those things like I said before. But from here you save the PDF. This is just a temporary file that's stored in a temporary location. If you close this the file is gone. So it acts just like you've never created a file. But if you do want to save this just use File, Save or Command S and then you have the full dialogue here where you can choose where to save the file and Save it. So there's only one more step from using Save As PDF to Open In Preview and Save As PDF. That is just to hit Command S. But you get the benefit to be able to preview everything before you save. 

Keep in mind you don't need to save right away. If you're not sure if you're going to save the PDF at this point you can Print, you can Open In Preview, and now this will remain open. You can switch to another app and then back to Preview. You can even Quit Preview and then launch Preview again and you'll see it is still open. So if you needed to take a break and get back to things then Preview allows you to basically save later, or much later, if you want. 

Note that this is dependent on using the default settings in System Settings. If you go to Desktop & Dock you've got the options right here for Ask To Keep Changes When Closing Documents and Close Windows When Quitting an Application. As long as those are both Off you can Quit an application, like Preview, with something open. Even if it hasn't been saved yet and then resume very easily the next time. It still hasn't saved the document but it is still there. 

Of course if you have your document in this intermediate state of being opened in Preview but not saved yet there are a lot of things you can do with it. For instance, you can use the Highlighter or the Markup Tools right here. So, for instance, I can mark this up before I ever save it as a PDF. I can add, say, some arrows here. You're going to see this little message saying that the original document, the temporary one, can't be changed. That's fine. You don't care about that because it doesn't matter to you whether you saved that original temporary document or this new temporary one. So I can add some markup things here. I can sign a document. I can use the Redaction Tool, for instance, right here so if there is something I want to redact, some text here or something, I can do that and then I can Save with Command S to save the PDF. So I can go right from an app I'm working in to a marked up redacted signed document without ever having to have saved it in an intermediate state first. 

You can also save a PDF that only has some of the pages. You can do this by going to Print here and then selecting, say, a range or a selection of pages. But you can also just jump right to Preview. Then you can go into the sidebar here and say delete a page just by using the Delete Key. Or, you can select a page or two, while you Shift to select two, and then Command C to copy and then do New From Clipboard to create a document with just those. Then you can Save this one or you could have gone in here and say deleted this page here and then Save. Either way you can get a document that only has certain pages in it or combine multiple documents this way without ever having to have saved them first. 

Now some apps let you export in many different ways. Pages does actually let you export images. But in any app you can use Print and then Open In Preview and then once it is in Preview you can go to File, Export and there are more options than just PDF. So I can export this as a jpeg image. It doesn't handle multiple pages. JPEG's don't do that. So I'm just going to get the first page here. But in a lot of cases that's all we want. So now I can Save this out and now here in the Finder you can see I've got this JPEG image. It obeyed that 72 dots per inch that I selected there. So, it is pretty pixelated. But I could have increased that if I wanted to. But the result is I end up with a JPEG from my document which in the case of a lot of apps you can't export directly to a JPEG. 

You can also Share a document without having to save it first. So if I go to Print and then I Open In Preview, now I have the option here to go to File and then Share or use the Share button at the top of the window there. I can Share to Mail, Messages, Notes, FreeForm, maybe some other things you have installed. So I can send this Pages document as a PDF through Preview without ever having to had saved it as a PDF in the first place. 

There's one more way to export from Preview that you can't do from Pages here if you do want to have a smaller PDF and you've got some really big images in your file. You can save some space usually by going to File, Print and then use Open In Preview. At this point you can go to File and then Export. Here choose PDF but choose the Quartz Filter, Reduce File Size. This will export the PDF, just like before, except every image will be compressed a little bit more. So the file will be smaller. 

I going to show you one tip here that makes this whole thing so much more useful. You can go to File, Print or just Command P. Once you're here you have to click here and choose Open In Preview. But there are two ways to make that faster. One is select Edit Menu instead. Set the default action to Open In Preview. So now you can click the PDF button and it performs Open In Preview instead of Save As PDF. A little bit easier. But even easier than that you can go to System Settings and then to Keyboard. Then select Keyboard Shortcuts. Now you want to select App Shortcuts here and click the Plus Button to Add a New Shortcut for all applications and the Menu Title is Open in Preview. Note very carefully it has got to be exactly that including the lower case i else it won't work. Then you can set the keyboard shortcut to Command P. That's the same as the print command. But it is okay because this will only show up in that special menu. So File Print is still Command P. I can do that. Once I'm in here then this special menu will also pick up those systemwide keyboard shortcuts. If I click here I can see that Open in Preview is now Command P as well. So, I can do Command P and without even lifting my finger off the command key do a second P and it will Open in Preview.

So now you have a quick way to get a PDF opened, but not saved, in Preview from almost any app. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.