Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Let's take a look at using Annotations in Preview.
I'm using Preview version 7 here and I'm going to show you how Annotations work.
If you have a PDF open and it's a normal PDF, not protected in any special way, you can
select text and copy text from it.
But you can also highlight text and you have that up here in the Toolbar.
I can simply click the Marker button here and it will highlight that text.
Now you can also select Color so you can change the color of the highlight.
The marker is kind of an on/off thing.
You can turn it on and you can see it is blue now.
I can actually highlight other text and you see that it is highlighted.
I don't have to press this again.
So I can highlight any text that I want, like that.
If I want to unhighlight text I just select that a second time.
So it is kind of like a tool where you can toggle the highlighting.
You can also just have that turned off there, select text, assign it something and now it's
not doing it, this is not on and I can select another color.
So you use the tool either way to highlight text in a PDF document.
You can also, if you don't like doing colors, you can use Underline or Strikethrough.
These are all useful both for highlighting for calling your attention back to something
in the document but also for editing.
If someone sends you a PDF and expects you to proofread it for them, for instance, you
can use these to mark things in the text for them to checkout later.
This makes the Strikethrough more obvious what you would use this for.
To be able to show something that you think should be deleted.
But there are many more tools that you can use.
You can click on this Edit toolbar here and you have a lot of different things that you
can do.
For instance you can add circles and rectangles and lines with arrows attached to them.
You can add bits of text here so have this text box float above something and then you
can add an arrow there like that.
So there is a lot of things you can do with these tools up here.
You can also add Notes which are the same thing as kind of adding text except that a
note will collapse to a little postage stamp thing there so you can put this somewhere
and then the person looking at it can then click on it and read what you have there.
Now if you save this file and somebody else opens it up in Preview they will see all these
annotations and they can edit them and change it themselves.
So it is perfect for passing the proofreading back to somebody.
Then they can remove the items as the take care of them.
But if you want to make them permanent, say you are actually marking something up and
you want to now have it where it is not editable, you can export it to PDF and it will save
it copy out with these highlights and arrows and bits of text and things permanently as
part of the document.
So we can just Save here to the Desktop and then I can open this one and you see here
I've got the post-it note is not even active anymore.
I can't even click it because it is just a graphic on there.
All this stuff is just permanently part of the document as opposed to this where I can
actually change it if I want.
So digging deeper into these tools notice that if I click on the text box I can do several
different styles including a speech bubble which is kind of neat and has kind of a built
in arrow to it.
Once I'm editing one of these I can change lots of things about the fonts or even the
line thickness of the bubble there.
You have other tools here as well.
For instance the line size for different elements like this arrow.
I can make it thinner.
I can make a two-headed arrow, that kind of thing.
Whether or not drop Shadow.
I can change color of course and do all sorts of other things to it.
So you have a wide variety of things that you can do when you are marking up a document.
Now there is some cross platform compatibility.
Here I've got the file that I've saved out and I can set it to Open With Adobe Reader.
In Adobe Reader I've got all those annotations there and they are editable.
I can select them.
I can change the text inside of the different things here.
You can even see this note here and the contents of it.
So it is not perfect.
I don't see the highlighting but you can actually pass this document back and forth between
somebody say on a Windows machine who only has Adobe Reader or prefers to use Adobe Reader
on the Mac.
Now I can use most of the annotation tools with images as well.
So I'm going to open up just a JPEG photograph here in Preview.
You see I obviously can't highlight anything because there is no text here but I can turn
all these tools and do things like, for instance, add some text.
Even a speech bubble.
I can add an arrow and a circle to the image.
Now this is a JPEG.
It doesn't really have the same ability to have elements like text does so if I save
this out what will happen is, you can see the image updates, that is a JPEG image, these
things are now permanently on this image.
I've still got the document open here so I can still edit these but as soon as I close
it and then reopen it you will see that it no longer retains that information that these
are separate elements.
Now they are permanently on there.
So you don't have quite the flexibility.
You might want to save a copy out if you are doing this.
Of course you can use the Browse All Versions and revert to the previous version if you
need to.
So we will go back to that one and restore it.
But you can see the difference there between annotating a PDF, something with text and
elements in it, and a JPEG image that is just a bitmap of pixels.
Of course this brings up another use of annotations.
You can use it to mark up photos.
So, for instance, just for a fun effect you can just add a speech bubble like this.