View Files with Preview

Task #39

Difficulty Level 2

Because Panther is so well connected to the Internet — and such a visual operating system to boot — it only makes sense that Apple would provide an image-viewing application such as Preview. Preview can handle an impressive number of different image formats, including both the familiar (JPG, GIF, and TIF) and the somewhat harder-to-find formats (PICT and PNG).

Panther also uses Preview to display PDF (Portable Document Format) documents, which are created by Adobe’s Acrobat application. These PDF files can be viewed on virtually all computer platforms in use today, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux. By using Preview, you can eliminate the guesswork about what application opens what type of image file; in fact, you can double-click directly on an image file, and Preview will automatically display it.

In this task, I demonstrate how to open and display an image file from within Preview.

Did You Know?

Preview can convert an image from one format to another; for example, you can convert a TIF image to a JPG image. To convert an image, open it and click File Export. Type a new name for the file and click the format that you want in the Format drop-down list box; then click Save.

Did You Know?

If you are viewing a PDF in Preview, you can search for a specific string of characters. Open the PDF in Preview and then press z+F to display the Search drawer. Type the text that you want to find in the Search box, and Preview automatically lists all occurrences of the text in the search list. To highlight a specific occurrence in the document, double-click its entry in the list.