How-to Guide:
Welcome to this tutorial on how to quickly and easily create an excerpt from a larger PDF and then crop that PDF to a smaller size using Mac OS and the application “Preview”. Preview is a built-in application on all Macs that allows you to view and edit PDFs, images, and other types of files.
First, open the PDF that you want to create an excerpt from in Preview. Next, use the selection tool to highlight the portion of the PDF that you want to extract. Once you have made your selection, go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Copy” or use the keyboard shortcut “Command + C”.
Next, create a new document in Preview by going to “File” and then “New From Clipboard”. This will create a new document with only the selected text. Now you can save this excerpt as a new PDF.
Finally, if you want to crop the PDF to a smaller size, first Zoom out to that you can see all 4 corner crop marks, then select all pages by clicking on one of the pages in the page thumbnails, and click “Command + A” to select all of them. Next, open the Markup tools by clicking the Pen icon and choose the rectangular selection tool.
Target the crop marks and eyeball your selection, then you can get more granular by opening the inspector tool and adjusting your selection size. Once you’re satisfied, click the Crop icon.
You’ll get a warning that the newly cropped sections might be visible in other programs. Click “OK” and continue on. Once done, save your changes.
And there you have it, by following these simple steps you can easily create an excerpt from a larger PDF and then crop it to a smaller size using Mac OS and the application “Preview”.
Video Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hello everyone. I’m Joseph Hinson, creator of the Ultimate Author Platform and president of Out:think, a firm that helps authors market their books. What I’m gonna do today is share something with you that you might not know how to do with Mac Os and preview. The situation is that I’m working on a book launch campaign and I have a a manuscript that is typeset and designed and ready for print.
The only problem is it has crop marks on it, so we’re gonna remove the crop marks. I’m also gonna show you how to trim down a 200 page pdf into a few pages really quickly with two keystrokes on preview. And what we’re gonna do then is we are gonna add another page to it. So all with preview .
So here we go. Let’s get going. All right, so first thing we’re gonna do is open the manuscript. All right? So this is how it would look in preview if you open it. And the, what we’re doing today is we’re gonna crop, we’re gonna remove these crop marks, okay? And we’re gonna bring it down to its actual six by nine intended size.
So first thing you do to do that is you click this little panel over here that [00:01:00] says thumbnails. All right? Now you can see all the thumbnails are there. There’s 265 or some odd thumbnails. So what we are gonna. So we’re gonna choose only the table of contents for this example, okay? This is Magic Words by Jonah Berger.
It’s a fantastic book. You should check it out. So what we wanna do is we’re gonna select the first one, hold shift. Okay? And then we’re gonna go all the way down to the last page and click it. Notice that just selected all of them. Okay? Now are you ready for the two keystroke new document?
Hold COMMAND and click C. Then click COMMAND N. That’s for “New Document”. The New document only has eight pages in it. That’s what we intended to do. Now with the other nice thing with this thumbnail tool is that you can drag stuff up and down. You can reorder pages, but you can also just remove pages that you don’t need.
In this case, I don’t need that blank page. I have my document. Now it’s time to crop. This is the most challenging part that I, that took me a little bit to [00:02:00] figure out how to do in preview. So I’m gonna tell you, and you don’t have to search the internet like I did. So we’re gonna click this markup tool that’s for annotation, and we’re gonna choose the rectangular selection tool. Then we are going to zoom out so that we can see all four crop marks at one go because we’re gonna first eyeball it, then we’re gonna select all of the documents. You can select all pages. You can do that by clicking on just one and hitting command A.
All right, so that selects all of the pages in one go. And then we’re gonna, we’re gonna, with the rectangular tool, we’re gonna eyeball. And drag it and try to make a rectangle that lines up on each of those crop marks because we’re virtually cutting all of the pages at once then to, to really, you could crop it, right?
You could be done right Now you click crop and you’re done. But what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna, I’m gonna, you don’t have to do this part, but I’m gonna show inspector and I am gonna, Make sure that I got exactly nine six by nine. So [00:03:00] on the left side it, it says 0.6, so that could be 0.6, 0.6 2.63.
The, usually it’s 0.625 of an inch. Okay? So that’s what you wanna get as close to in this case, I’m just gonna say 0.63. And then I’m gonna click this other area and add 0.63 to that one as well. And what that what that’s gonna do is just move the crop marks a teeny tiny bit. . And then we’re gonna say width is six.
That’s correct. And then the height is nine. And then I’m gonna click that and click away. Okay. So here’s, it gets finicky. So he did this to me the other day. So what you wanna do is on top, you gotta go back here. Make sure that every time you change something, it doesn’t change another field.
So that just moved it all back up. So for some reason it likes to to get all persnickety whenever you change those numbers. In fact, if you change these ones over here and then move back, it doesn’t do that. Alright, now that’s done and all the other pages are [00:04:00] selected and you can see, you can tell that’s the case.
By seeing that dotted line, that means it’s gonna cut and click crop, it’s gonna tell you that. Outside of the document, stuff may still be visible If someone’s using certain programs, that’s okay. Worst case scenario, somebody sees your crops, but you’re not giving ’em those ugly crop marks to begin with.
So click Okay, there we go. So now we have the thing, and it’s been cropped. Okay, so what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna save this piece. Command S is gonna allow me to save this as a pdf. You wanna make sure your format is pdf. Okay? And then I’m gonna call this Magic words TOC. For table of contents.
All right. Now, that would be enough right there, but I’m not gonna end there. I’m gonna leave you with one more tip for this video, and that is how to append another PDF to, to your existing pdf.
Okay? Because when you’re doing book marketing, there might be all kinds of little things. You have all kinds of eBooks, but you might have one cover page you want to be on every single one, or you might have a [00:05:00] last page. And that’s what I’m gonna do. So I’m gonna go to my downloads and I’m gonna, I’m looking for the thumbnail that I’m looking for.
There it is right there. Last page. I’m gonna click it. I’m gonna drag it and I’m gonna drop it right in into the document. I’m gonna scroll down and make sure it’s there so I can look at my thumbnail and you see it’s there. And then I can page through my document and I can see, whoops. I can page through my document and I can see.
that there it is. Now, whenever this prints, it’ll just adjust the size so it won’t look as awkward as it looks here or awkward as it might look even on a device or something. And you could change with the paper size if you wanted this to be six by nine. It’s not it’s letter, but if somebody prints it out, they’re printing it on letter paper anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
PDFs often will scale the size conveniently. So we have our table of contents and I’m gonna hit command S again to save over the document I was already working on and so I can close it out and then I’ll open it up again. I’m gonna close this one out too, cuz I was done with that a long time ago. And I [00:06:00] wanna go back to magic words, table of contents and I’m gonna scroll through the table of contents and just see that pretty thing come up.
Yeah, there you go. We got the pre-order bonuses. So that’s how to use preview to edit and manipulate your your PDF documents. And it’s super helpful. I use this all the time. Now, sometimes I do have to get Acrobat in if I’m linking things or adding text to it. It’s just not as easy with preview, but.
Hopefully this helps, and if it does help. Do me a favor, like this video, share it with somebody who might need it.
If you want, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and for even more bonuses, subscribe to our newsletter at O U T T H I N K dot C O. That’s outthink.co. Thank you for your time. Go be awesome.