Tip of the Day, August 24th, 2008

Did You Know– ?

The Preview program that comes with OS X 10.5 can do some pretty spiffy things. In fact, it can do some of the things Photoshop can do, and some of the stuff that Acrobat can do, and a whole bunch of stuff that neither can do. And it’s free.

In Part I of this tip (today’s blog entry) I’ll outline some of the really handy features built into Preview. Part II will explain how to use these features. Email me and tell me which features you want explained first– this is your chance to influence the blog.
You can use Preview to…

1. combine two or more PDF documents.
2. delete one or morepages from a PDF document.
3. rotate one or all pages in a PDF document.
4. crop one or more pages in a PDF document.
5. mark up or otherwise highlight a PDF document.
6. adjust color/brightness/shadows/etc. in a JPG document.
7. adjust size and resolution in a JPG document.
8. save documents as PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG… and Photoshop format.

Pretty neat. Try some of these things on your own. If you can’t figure out how to make them work, do what researchers at the Christian Boyce Center for Advanced Macintosh Studies do– namely, “guess.” In Preview, your guess is likely to be right.

That’s it for now. Vote for the features you want explained. We’ll follow up within a few days.

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