Remove Shadows from Annotations in Preview

A lot of people are suggesting Skitch. I have used that tool and it is great... up until the last big update they did. LOTS of features were removed. Just a heads up to future readers of this thread.

The white speech bubble is the only thing I know that is usable in the current version that can white out areas without leaving a shadow. The cruddy part is working around the cartoonish outline of a big cloud.

Apple, please add the abiilty to remove the box shadows!

This burned me in a big way (the boxed text being removed in Mountain Lion).

I dunno skitch, but random massive changes scare me.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

It's a little wonky in that you have to go into preferences to change the "Box" and "Box interior" before creating boxes. But it works, and almost identical to the old "boxed text" that I found out about here, and loved.

The note about distributing PDF's with redacted text I found in another thread somewhere is valid, and worth mentioning -- Since I'm creating prints that hide un-related text (think expense reports) this is perfect for me. But distributing PDFs with notes covering things doesn't hida anything. ;-)

Oh, and if you make changes with skim, they aren't viewable in preview. :-( But you can print, and the prints will be correctly shown in preview. :-) But you can edit the text "under" the note, and see what that is pretty easily. :-(

Still, as I said, I print these and I'm happy.

Sean

The stupid Apple people are so extremely incompetent. With their overpriced softwares and products they are not even able to do this white-out thing. I'm frustrated and disappointed. The programmers department should know how lowly we think of them. With windows, you can just use MSpaint and paint it out, but with Mac, you have to go thru all the troubles to find an app that can actually do it. I didn't know Apple is only good on the outside and super wannabe on the inside.

To make the stuff you've hidden really go away, hit Print, then the PDF button in the print dialog box. The menu item "Save as pdf" will "print" the image to a new pdf file, which contains only what would have shown up on a printed copy.

Huh?? I'm using the latest version of everything here, and the shadows are there, just as they've always been.

The white speech bubble does the trick ;-) Wouldn't have thought to try it if I hadn't read it in this thread.

YES, it does -- once you figure out how to asssign the color white to both the lines and the fill. 😎

I use the rectangle to do rectangular areas, and then a stretched-out bubble to cover up the shadows.

If you are just trying to delete/blank out parts of a document, simply use the Rectangle Selection tool, highlight the area, and hit delete. It may want you to conver it to a PNG, but when you save it back as a JPG it will be white. Or, you can use file->export, and save it as a PNG and just uncheck the Alpha box.

😁

I've finally got a decent solution, which is especially good for whiting out text:

1. Use Tools->Annotate->Text to create a text box.

2. Click in the box to get into the text entry mode.

3. Open up the Character Viewer (national flag in your menu bar, or option-cmd-T).

4. Double-click the "FULL BLOCK" character (the largest black square symbol) from the Geometric Shapes collection. This should put a black square in the text box.

5. Change the font size to get the desired height, if necessary, then

6. Copy the symbol, and paste repeatedly until you have the desired text blacked out.

7. Select all, change the font color to white, and admire your work.

NOTE: The original text is still there, hiding behind the white boxes, and can be uncovered by deleting the "whiteout" that you've just applied. To make the change permanent, use the print command, and under the PDF menu select "Save as PDF". The saved file won't contain the hidden text.

This does work! Thanks!

I couldn't find FULL BLOCK in Character Viewer under Mountain Lion. But there's a search function. So, I figured out how to enter UNICODE into the search box:

1) Turn on Unicode Hex Entry

(from https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1899290)

First go to international system preferences-> input menu and check the box next to "Unicode hex". then switch to unicode input in the menu bar. now to enter a unicode character you hold alt and enter the hexadecimal unicode value.

2) No open the character viewer window

3) Select the Unicode Hex Input method from the menu bar

4) in the search box, hold down Option and type "2588" then let go of Option.

The Full Block character should be inserted, and you can now drag the character to your favorites.

You can do it in other places as well: █

Gotta love Unicode.

Would you like some cheese to go with with your whine? There's no shortage of graphic editing programs for the Mac, as good as or better than MS Paint. (And try editing a pdf file with MS Paint -- do let us know how you get on with that! 😁)

"Preview" is for viewing files, and has only basic annotation functions. We're just trying to make the most of them here, bending them to accomplish actual editing, which Preview is not designed to do.

I'm sorry, I didn't think I was whining. I was just posting to help anyone reading this thread who couldn't find FULL BLOCK in Character Viewer. Unless you were addressing macobs30's post saying "It works!" ;-)

I'm unclear about the rest of your post. Why would you talk about MS Paint on an Apple forum? I don't post about Okular and eVince.

I'm well aware Preview is for viewing files. But then, Apple gives us lots of editing options with Preview. And one of them *WAS* the ability to have shadow-less blocks. They're removed that. And I, like everyone here, I presume, am just trying to find a more elegant way of blocking out sections of documents I'm submitting to my company for reimbursement. But I don't care enough to buy or find software to load on all the macs I might use to do that, and they can deal with mysterious shadows (as they do now, since I don't have a good solution for it).

I appreciate that you found a relatively simple solution. I just didn't see FULL BLOCK anywhere in the Character Viewer.

That was aimed at babymandrake.

in the latest version you can also use a small selection on a similar color area, e.g. white. then copy it and paste it, it will appear somewhere else with handles. then you can move these handles (e.g. move and/or stretch) that over the offending area and then block things out like that.