In the past I've mentioned before how you can use Save as PDF to save a webpage or document,
say from Numbers, and then crop it to only print a certain portion of that document or
page.
But here's another way to look at it.
What if you just want to save a portion.
You want to save it either as an image or as a PDF.
Now you can do this using Screenshot functionality.
A lot of people do.
But I want to show you why that's not a good idea and show you the right way to do it.
So let's start with Screenshot functionality.
I'm at a webpage here.
I'm going to do Shift, Command, 4 so I can select a part of the image and it will automatically
save it as a screenshot.
So image this first paragraph here is what I want to save.
Maybe I want to post it on social media to prove a point or something.
Or maybe this is an airline ticket I'm viewing and I just want to save this one portion here
and not the rest of the page.
I do that and I end up with a file here.
A screenshot file.
Now here's why I don't think this is a good idea.
If you double click on this you get something that looks like exactly what you want.
However, if you zoom in on it you can see it's pixelated.
It's saving the pixels on the screen so you get little pixels there.
If you try to print it is going to look a little blocky.
If you try to zoom in on it or if you save it to social media and somebody decides to
get a larger view of it they're not going to be able to.
It's going to look kind of like this.
So let's look at a better way to do it.
As you may have guessed this is going to use Print as PDF functionality.
So I'm going to use Print and I'm going to say PDF.
But I'm going to go directly to Open in Preview.
Now like Safari has an export to PDF function and so does Numbers and such.
This gets you in one step to Preview.
In this case it's a huge document.
You can see that there.
You'll think the next thing I want to do is crop.
I'm going to click on Markup Toolbar here.
I'm going to click on the Selection and I'm going to select the first paragraph.
Now you'd think here what I want to do is crop.
You can do that but you're going to keep the entire document and kind of hide everything
else.
Real quick and easy I'm going to Copy, Command C, then I'm going to Command N. Command N
is File New from Clipboard.
Command C, Command N. Now I get a little document here that only has the portion that I want.
I'm going to save this one, Save it to the desktop.
Now here's the interesting thing.
If I Hide that and I Hide that you can see here there's that first one and I showed you
how when you zoom in it's no good.
Here is the second one.
The second one, when I zoom in because I'm actually saving the characters and everything
there is intact, you can see it's nice and smooth.
So it's going to print really nicely.
This may be important if you're trying to print something like an airplane ticket or
a receipt or something like that.
You want to have the highest quality.
Now, when we were looking in Preview, let's do this again, let's Print, Open in Preview,
we could also grab a section that we wanted.
So let's grab a larger section here.
Let's say I went to Command C to copy and Command N to paste.
Now let's say I really do want this to be an image because I want to post this to social
media.
You can go and export, File Export from Preview, and you can change the format to jpeg.
You even get to pick the quality and the resolution so you can adjust that.
Now here's that jpeg image.
I can open that up.
You can see you have that same issue there where it's blocking now because it's an image.
But as I said it does work really well for posting.
If I were to print, I'm sorry not print, but Export and choose jpeg and then go with a
higher resolution, like 300 pixels per inch, let me replace what was there before, now
let me close all of these, now I get this new image here.
This new image is still pixelated but you can see the pixels are much smaller compared
to the rest of the image so it will show up at a decent resolution.
So there's some really quick simple ways you can grab a portion of a webpage or portion
of a Numbers document or something like that and save it as a PDF, save it as a jpeg for
various uses.