bodmas.org

Preview in Mac OS X

Filed in Maths, ILT on March 28th 06 .

Angle puzzle - easy - cut from PDF in Preview

Mac OS X Tiger comes with a number of basic applications including Grab, Preview and Grapher. Preview is the built in PDF file viewer. It is small, quick and simple to use as a PDF viewer, but as Mac OS X uses the PDF file type for printing and for describing the screen contents, preview has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

The diagram above was produced in Word 2004 as part of a simple worksheet – I often have students doing three or four questions about last week’s work at the beginning of a lesson as a kind of starter, the problems are chosen to point towards this week’s work. This helps soak up the varied arrival times of students, especially in a workshop period at the start of the College day.

In Word, I printed the worksheet as a PDF file (Mac OS X can produce PDF files from any application). Then I viewed the PDF file in Preview. To cut the diagram out, I just

  • Clicked on the Select tool in the tool bar
  • Dragged a box around the diagram – the rest of the page turns dark grey and the selected area remains white. Handles allow resizing the selection
  • Clicked Edit | Copy in the Preview menu (or apple-c)
  • Selected File | New From Clipboard in the Preview File menu
  • A new Preview window appears with just the diagram
  • Select File | Save As from the Preview File menu
  • Set the file type to GIF, JPG or PNG (or indeed EPS or PDF for re-import into a drawing program)

The results can be seen above. Just what you need to keep the class blog rolling…

This is filed under Maths, ILT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed for this post.

[ bodmas home ]

Subscribe to bodmas.org using RSS

offline blogging tool ecto in use on bodmas

Site delivered by WordPress

Entries and comments feeds.

© Content Keith Burnett, 2006. This old school table-based layout was devised to support a Web authoring module. Mind you, it loads quicker than Kubrick in Safari...