Annotating Documents With Preview

You can annotate PDF documents using Preview. You can use a variety of tools such as highlighting, notes, adding g arrows, shapes and text. Annotations can then be edited or removed by others using Preview or Adobe Reader. You can also mark up images, though you cannot edit them after saving.

Comments: 19 Responses to “Annotating Documents With Preview”

    Bob Forsberg
    10 years ago

    Excellent expansion on Preview. I use it often and was unaware of many of its uses you spoke about. Also, limiting your face time to the beginning keeps viewers focused on the very informative and well presented educational videos you produce.

    Dave S
    10 years ago

    These presentations are much better than a text book. Wow, I learn so much watching. I had no idea Preview could be so powerful. Thanks.

    Scott Griswold
    10 years ago

    Excellent information.... Thank you....

    Steve
    10 years ago

    Great video. Short and sweet and I learned a lot about Preview that I didn't know before. I'll be referring friends to watch!

    Shirley Allan
    10 years ago

    You also might want to Choose the View Tool and select Highlights and Notes to put the corresponding note annotation in a sidebar.
    Yet another great Video! Thanks Gary!
    Shirley Allan

    Stephen
    10 years ago

    I followed your instruction to a tee on several PDF's and my Preview 7.0 will not highlight the text in a PDF. Why would that be? The videos in general are all great and I learned how to do more then what you get from Apple, keep up the good work.

      10 years ago

      Perhaps that PDF is locked? Try making a PDF yourself and see if that works. Also, check Tools, Text Selection.

    George
    10 years ago

    Thank you for the information. I always gain so much from your column.

    Ernie
    10 years ago

    I watched this video of yours, how do I know what version in my preview on my Mac. I opened a pdf file then opened preview, I didn't get a tool bar to do what you did in this video.

      10 years ago

      Versions of Preview are tied to the version of OS X you have. So this is "Mavericks" Preview. But you can find out the version number like with any other app. Just go to the menu bar and choose Preview, About Preview. This is version 7.0.
      If you don't see the toolbar, go to the View menu. That is where you can show and hide toolbars.

    Ben
    10 years ago

    In regard to Stephen's problem with highlighting text, he likely is working with PDF files that haven't undergone OCR. To my mind not having OCR capability is a major flaw of Preview. Most scanners will do OCR, but some require an actual scan, rather than being able to do OCR on a PDF already on the computer. I use PDFpen for PDF files that need OCR.

    Sean
    10 years ago

    Great post! I use preview almost daily but I have never explored it. I had no idea it had all these features. This will save me so much time at work. Thank you so much!

    Clement
    10 years ago

    One of your strongest and clearest posts I've seen.

    RBS
    10 years ago

    Previous versions of Preview allowed the option to change highlighter colour to any numbers of colours from the colour wheel. In Lion there was a bit more of an elaborate process but it could be done. In the Mavericks Preview - you can only choose out of 5 colours - there is no option to use the colour wheel to select more colours. Is there any way work around as in Lion - or is that feature completely gone for good. I do a lot of highlighting of pdfs and could really use the extra colours.

      10 years ago

      I can't see any way to customize the highlight colors. If you really need this functionality, then why not use a more complex editor like Adobe Acrobat?

        RBS
        10 years ago

        Thanks for the suggestion. However I already have Adobe Acrobat XI but that only allows yellow highlights - no other colours.

        I have also tried a ton of other pdf annotators from the App Store - but all seem to have a maximum of 5 colours (Pdf Reader X has 10 incl. grey and black and is what I use now - however it does not have the functionality of Preview).

        I need to markup up long complicated documents and the limitless colours of the old Preview really made the job a lot easier.

    RS
    10 years ago

    In an older version of preview I used to be able to open all of the notes on a side bar that corresponded to that page. Is there any way to still do that in newer versions of preview?

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