Problems with Paste - from Preview

Welcome to Apple Discussions Manu

No, I'm not missing the point. As users here, we can just sympathize & point out workarounds, we have to control over changing the program. To have any chance of the problem/complaint being fixed, you need to leave feedback for the Pages team.

I've noticed the same very irritating problem. The non-Leopard version of Preview would allow one to select a portion of a PDF document, copy it, and then paste into into another document, such as into a Keynote Presentation.

After it was copied, it would retain its PDF character -- that is, it could be enlarged without losing resolution.

This feature no longer works.

We are having to revert to previous OS until this is solved since so much of our graphics work depends upon this relatively simple feature.

I am having the same problem. I am glad it isn't just me. Has anyone found a solution to this problem? This taking me forever having to save each selection as a JPEG and importing into Pages.

Thanks

I also am having copy/paste problems with Preview, but in regards to pasting to Microsoft Word (for Mac 2004). When the text is pasted to Word it cuts the lines after a few words leaving me the long task of backspacing each individual line. Anyone else experience this or have any solutions. Thanks.

It's not a Preview or Pages "problem." You'll find the same issue with a PDF opened in Acrobat Reader. Text copied from PDFs has line breaks/paragraph breaks at the end of each line of text. One of the functions added with WordService by Devon Technologies, is the ability to remove line endings from selected text.

is there a solution with the copy paste issue in pages yet?

?Huh? Copy from what? I explained copying from PDFs. Line breaks in text copied from PDFs is normal, whether the text is pasted in Pages, TextEdit, AppleWorks, or any other word processor. You have to remove them manually or use Devon Technologies WordService.

and I want to copy pictures from a pdf document and paste it in pages. if you copy a selected picture and paste it in pages, you copy the whole document and not the selected picture. that is really anoying

It doesn't matter if I've selected, cropped, saved & then reopened a PDF in Preview, Pages always pastes the original full page. Open the PDF with Acrobat Reader & use the snapshot/camera tool to copy just the area you want & then paste that into Pages. Or open the PDF in a graphics editing program such as GraphicConverter or Photoshop Elements to select & copy just the area you want.

Dear Peggy, I think you may be missing the nature of the problem.

The Acrobat snapshot tool used on PDF/postscript graphics copies a bitmap version of the selected area. When this is pasted onto another application such as Pages/Keynote there is a substantial loss in the quality of the graphics. This is more obvious when you paste in Pages and then print the document.

In the earlier versions of OSX, copying a selected area in Preview and pasting it in Pages/Keynote would retain perfect EPS content and quality. As you say the whole PDF page would be pasted, however it would be masked to show only the original selection done in Preview with the "select" tool.

I hope this clarifies the nature of the problem and complaint a little better.
Regards,

Manu

By "crop" here I suppose you mean "select part of the document, copy, and create a new document of the clipboard"?

If so, funnily enough it does not work. I can easily create a new document, as described above, and it has the constrained portion of the page. However, when I import that page into Pages, the full page is displayed.

I would say this is a Preview problem as much as a Pages problem.

Hi All

here is a less elegant workaround to crop PDFs from Preview and pasting them into Keynote/Pages. I found this surfing the web. If you copy a selected area in Preview and you pasted in an OmniGraffle document, it will pasted it correctly. Once pasted in OmniGraffle you can cut/paste again into Keynote/Paste. This seems to work and retain the exact masking of the original selection.

The process is a bit painful, however it can be automated using iKey. Below are some instructions:

1) Download the following programs:
OmniGraffle ( http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/)
iKey ( http://www.scriptsoftware.com/ikey/)

2) In the iKey Editor create a new shortcut (e.g. command-alt-c) to do the following macro:

Launch/Show Preview
Copy to Clipboard (with delay of 0.5 s)
Launch/Show OmniGraffle
Paste Clibboard
Cut selection to Clipborad (with delay of 0.5 s)

WARNING: the delays of 0.5 is important to allow the image to be stored in the clipboard.

3) Now you can paste in either Keynote or Pages and the PDF will remain cropped.

Let me know if it works.
Best regards,

Manu

I also found this problem to be extremely irritating, given how easy it used to be in older versions of Leopard/Preview/whatever.

The easiest solution I've found:

1) In Preview, go up to File > Grab > Selection
2) Select the area of the page that you would like to capture.
3) In the snapshot window that appears with your selection, select-all (Command-a) and then copy (Command-c).
4) Paste into Keynote as you used to.

As far as I can tell, this method still preserves PDF resolution.

My problem involves copying a foreign language document with Eastern European diacritical marks from a Word or PDF or Web source and trying to Paste it into Word or Pages. The accents are pasted as symbols (!, &, +, etc). Is there a way to do this? I've tried changing the International settings, but nothing seems to work.

Here's some Latvian, typed (I hope it transmits in HTML)

Latvijas Kara muzejam nodotas unikālas liecības par Otrā pasaules kara beigās
izveidotās Kureļa grupas traģēdiju

And this is it copied and pasted

Latvijas Kara muzejam nodotas !uniklas liec&bas par Otr! pasaules kara sbeig!
sizveidot! Kurea" grupas diju.tra,+

Cheers,

Ian

A point of clarification: I'm not interested in an image of my text, I want yo copy and paste editable text.

BTW, PDFPen allows you to copy and reformat anything you like from a PDF document,
http://www.smileonmymac.com/pdfpen

Ian

I'm afraid the problem is with the original PDF file. If you type a document in Latvian in Pages, generate a PDF and copy text from that PDF, it should work.

However, I do not know what the problem is with the PDF file. It may be that it uses a non standard font that maps the characters incorrectly. It is also possible that it uses an encoding incorrectly somehow.

I do not know how to fix it, unless you can find the source that was used to create the PDF.