Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at how to print out only a portion of a document.
Let's say you only want to print out a portion of something you are looking at.
Say it is a web page or an email or a document you are working on.
You just want to really quickly print something that is just an excerpt from it instead of
all the pages or a page that is filled with graphics.
Well there is a quick and easy way to do this that works across all applications.
So as an example say you are looking at the text specs at the Apple web site for a MacBook
Pro and you've got all this information here and graphics and you just want to print out
a small portion of it like say the list here of the inputs and outputs.
So you've got that right here and you just want to print that out.
Well an easy way to do that is you do Command P for print and it is going to be a multi-page
document here.
I'm going to go down to where at the bottom it says PDF and you probably already know
that you can save as a PDF instead of printing to paper.
But you can also do Open PDF in Preview which really quickly prints it out to a PDF document
that opens it in Preview.
We get to see it here in Preview and we can see there are a lot of different pages.
All the different pages here.
But we only want to print that one section that we were looking at.
That one section right here which will save a lot of paper than printing out the entire
thing.
Well it would be great to be able to select this area and print it but if we select this
area you see it is going to select it as text here which isn't going to save to formatting.
We can also hold down the Option key and select an area but it is still going to select it
as text.
So the cool thing we can do here is we can go to Tools and change to Rectangular Selection.
So now when we select it selects an area like that.
Now we can copy that, paste it to a new document, Edit, Copy and then File New from Clipboard.
The keyboard shortcuts are Command C and Command N. So very quickly, just by hitting those
two command shortcuts, I create this new preview document that just has the section in here.
Now the cool thing about this is it actually is a PDF document.
If I were to zoom in on it, I can see that the text will zoom in properly.
If I had simply just taken a screen shot, that is another technique you can use for
the same thing, take a screen shot of that area then it bit maps.
So if I zoom in on it I can see the pixels.
Here this is the real thing.
It is real text.
I have this quick little document now that I can print.
I don't even have to save it, as a matter of fact I probably won't, and I'll just print
this text here and I won't waster paper printing the rest of the document.
Now another option that you can use for single page documents, (let me close this document
here as I'm not going to use it), is that you can use the crop here.
So once I have selected a rectangular area, again switch to Tools to Rectangular Selection,
or simply bring up the Tools here by hitting this icon and then I can hit this here for
Rectangular Selection, Select, I can then hit the crop button but look what's going
to happen there.
It is going to crop it, just that one page, so I still have the other pages.
Here is page 2 and here is page 4.
Page 3 is cropped to this.
So for multiple documents it doesn't work as well as the copy and New Document from
Clipboard.
So once you have done this a few times it becomes very easy and quick.
You just print.
Go to the PDF button and select Open it in Preview.
Switch to Rectangular Selection area, Copy, New Document from Clipboard and then you can
print that section.
This works for anything.
If you want to print a portion of something you are working on, for instance, that's great.
It is also fantastic for if you want to print out tickets and you notice that the page is
filled with advertisements and all sorts of things you don't actually need on the page.
You just need the information that is actually part of the ticket.
You can basically just copy that portion of the page and then just print that and save
all the ink and paper printing the rest of it.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with
MacMost Now.