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Spectrum

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 23, 2005
1,813
1,117
Never quite sure
I'd like to make pdf grabs (select/copy) from Preview documents and paste them into an application where I can add comments around the sides/crop them etc. for presentation and note taking.

I'd also like to be able to embed local hyperlinks within the pasted grabs to the original pdf document found on my hard drive. (I don't mind adding these hyperlinks manually.)

Well, Mellel, Keynote and Pages allow me to paste in high quality cut and pasted areas from pdfs (Although they are converted to images, and any text contained is no longer selectable like it was in the pdf in Preview). However, none of those three applications enable links to external documents - Keynote and Pages only allow links to Webpages and other Keynote/Pages documents (or internal links to other slides/pages). I can't figure out how to put any kind of hyper link in Mellel.

Word and Powerpoint can do the hyperlinking, but the quality of the copy/pasted grabs is terrible (I read this is because they are old Carbon apps). One work around is to zoom in and take screen grabs (command+shift+4) but this only really works if the area I want to gab is small. It also (obviously) losing the possibility of being able to select the text.

Is there an application out there that can do all of the above? Ideally any text within the pasted in pdf grab would be selectable so that I could copy it separately just like in Preview itself.

I guess what I am really asking for is a simple pdf-aware graphics/text compositing application.

Any ideas?
 
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