I use Pages for a number of quick graphic projects that involve combining images and text. I find Pages is really fast and fairly capable of handling layering, media placeholders, etc. for this with the page layout mode. However, I was wondering if there was a simpler and faster way of exporting these page layouts to an image file (such as .JPG) with fewer steps than what I’ve been doing.
Currently, I go through, in the Pages menu, File -> Print. Once in the Print Dialog box, I click the drop-down menu ‘PDF’ and select ‘Open in Preview’. From there I save as a JPG or PNG.
I haven’t used it in a while, but I believe this exporting function is already in the Keynote menu, but Keynote doesn’t quite behave the way I find to be as easy as in Pages.
I’d like to retain the ease of using Pages for my graphic projects, but be able to more simply and easily export these pages as an image file, such as a .JPG, directly from the Pages menu — hopefully eliminating any superfluous steps I am currently taking.
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Chrissie W.
The way you are doing it is the way I would do it. At least if I had to use Pages.
But I would also encourage you to revisit Keynote for this. For me, if I wanted to create graphics with the tools, I would definitely use Keynote. Same tools, but easier to create a "canvas" for the image, have multiple images in one document (slides) and export directly to an image file. Plus, as a bonus, you can export images with a transparent background in Keynote, which you can't do in Pages+Preview.