If you only want a graphic, it may be worthwhile to check if it’s a drawing or an image. If you only want a piece of text, without tables or fancier 2D display, you can copy the selection with the text tool and paste that into Textedit (or pages, etc.) that would work for the recipe example above. This can be surprisingly bulky, as it includes all the page’s fonts and drawing instructions. That box has a “marching ants” animated border, with handles in the corners and sides to resize it.Ī caveat on PDF selections: Preview copies and stores the entire page on which your selection appears when you save it as PDF or paste it into another Mac application, adjusting the crop window to your outline. Click the rectangular selection tool (the red arrow points to it in this screenshot), then drag out a box around the area you wish to select. Not seeing the selection tool? From the Preview menu, select View > Markup Toolbar. Copy the area using Edit > Copy, or Command (⌘) – C, and you’ve captured the section you want. To begin, open the PDF on your Mac in the Preview app and drag a selection box across the area to keep. I want the tickets, not the advertising on the PDF, so I need to select just that section.

An example I’ll use here is a PDF I received a long time ago containing digital tickets to an event.

In this post, I’ll show you how to work with PDF selections in Preview.Ĭreating a “PDF Selection” refers to taking a full PDF document from a scan or other source, then selecting a section of the document by dragging a selection box around it. One feature I wasn’t aware of until I was writing an article about using Image Capture to scan documents was that the Preview app can also be used to manipulate PDF files. It’s the default viewer app for image files on Macs, and it has many tools for editing photos. The macOS Preview app is the “Swiss Army Knife” of Mac apps.

How to use preview mac os x