How To Print a Portion of a Page on a Mac

If you just want to print a portion of any document, you can jump from the Print Dialog to Preview very easily, select an area, crop or create a new document, and print that. You can also use this to share or save a portion of a document.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to print just a portion of a page or image on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now let's say you're viewing a large piece of content. Maybe a Pages or Word document. Maybe a webpage. But you just want to print a portion of it. There's an easy way to do that.  You do start by using the regular print dialogue. So you can use Command P or go to File, Print. Then you're going to get the regular print dialogue. Here it will show you a preview on the left. You'll see there are 49 pages here. Now you can select a range of pages or you can use Selection and just select certain pages from the sidebar. That's for printing entire pages. But what if you just wanted to print one portion of a page? 
Well, if you have a multipage document a great way to start with that is just pick the specific page you want. So, for instance, let's just do Page 2. Then we're going to go to the PDF button where we're going to click the right side of it with the down arrow there and go to Open In Preview. This will create a PDF but it is just a temporary PDF. It will open in Preview. It hasn't saved this anywhere. So this is kind of like a more advanced print dialogue. Now that it is in Preview you just are dealing with this one page. We can do various things with it. 
One of the things we can do is click the Markup Tools button at the top here. Then go to the Selection tool which is the second one from the left. Now we can drag a rectangle around an area that we want to print. Then with that selected we have two options. One is simply to Crop. You can go to Tools, and then Crop or Command K is a quick keyboard shortcut. It will give you a warning here. But it is handy to check this box so you don't get warned every time. Now you're just down to this one portion here. So you can go to Print. There's actually a Print button at the bottom right hand corner of Preview, only when use Preview from the Print Dialogue. But you can still just go to File, Print from here and then just print this one portion of that page. 
Another thing you can do with the selection is you can grab a selection, like this, and then you can use Command C to Copy and then you can use Command N, which is New From Clipboard. This will create a new temporary document. Again it is not saved anywhere yet. We can just print this now. This is handy when you want to print multiple parts of a page. So I can do this and then when I'm done printing I can close it and delete it and then I can select perhaps another section and do the same thing here. Copy, Command N for new, and then Print this section.
This also works really well if you goal is not to Print but to save this as a separate document. So now that I've go this here I can Save and save this out as a PDF that I can just have this piece of information here. Note the PDF is still a PDF. It's not an image. I can actually grab the text here very easily. So it is handy for more than just printing. Later on you can actually get information from this. You can also very easily Share this. If I were to Copy here and then, say, go to Mail and then in a new document would Paste I get a little PDF here that is just this section of the document. 
Now this works for Images as well. Here I'm viewing an image in Photos but it could be in anything I could print. Then in Photos it is a two-step process. So I'm here on this page where I can choose the layout. Then I could click Print and then it goes to the Print Dialogue. From here I can go to Open in Preview and now I get this here. You can see since I used Fit here it is going to rotate the image. I can use Tools and then Rotate right or left, or just Command R, to change that if I want. I can go to Markup. Choose Selection and then select an area. Then I could use Edit, Copy, Command C, and then File, New From Clipboard. Or I can simply use Crop and then Crop it to this. Remember this is some sort of unsaved document here. So anything I do here, like cropping, isn't going to affect the actual image in the Photos App. So I can Print or if I want I could actually do File, Save and save this. Or I can select an area, Copy it from here, and then go into an app like Mail and Paste just the portion of that image. It's kind of this new temporary image here that now I can send.
It's handy because in the Photos App you can't really do that. You can Crop this image and then share it and then go back and Revert to Original but it is handy to be able to just leave the image as is and use Print, Open In Preview, and then Copy a portion to just send a portion of an image without effecting the original photo.
Of course here you can do the same thing in Pages. I do Command P for Print. I could then go to Open In Preview. Then I get this temporary document here. I can find the portion that I want. Go to Markup Tools. Click here to make a selection. Then make the selection. Now note that since I selected several pages to print, if I do Command K to Crop here it just crops this one page. So this is a case where Command C and then Command N, for file new from clipboard, is a better option. This is super handy in Numbers where a lot of times you do want to just print a portion here. So I'll do Command P to Print and then I'll click the print button here. Then I'll choose Open in Preview. Then from here I go to Markup, Select, select the area I want, I'm going to do a quick Command C, Command N and I've got my new little temporary document here that I can now do Command P and just print that portion.
So it does seem like there are a lot of steps to doing this. You've got to Print. You've got to Open In Preview. You've got to go to Markup Tools, go to the Selection tool, make your selection, Command C, Command N, and then Command P to Print again. But it is fairly quick to do once you get the hand of it. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Print a Portion of a Page on a Mac”

Gautam

1 year ago

Hi Gary,
I am trying to print a long table made in Numbers through the Preview app. However, when I copy and create a preview file using "New from Clipboard" it pastes the entire table on 1 page. When I try to change the scale to enlarge it, it crops part of the table that does not fit on to the single page and therefore I cannot print the entire table. How can I overcome this issue.
Your help is appreciated.
Regards,
Gautam

Gary Rosenzweig

Gahran: check out https://macmost.com/strategies-for-printing-from-mac-numbers.html for some ideas on how to do that.

Comments Closed.

How To Print a Portion of a Page on a Mac

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Print a Portion of a Page on a Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information