Capturing a Portion of a PDF for Printing

Amazing Tips - Capturing a portion of a PDF for printing 

Only want to print a section or area of a PDF page? Here's how

A little background on PDF files:

It became apparent years ago that there needed to be a file type that would allow people to view documents that were created in unique programs, programs that not many people used, without the viewer actually having the software on their computer. This was a problem that graphic designers and architects and the like were having when they wanted to share their creations with clients who didn't own the expensive software. Their clients couldn't be expected to purchase programs that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars just to view the designs so Adobe (and others) developed PDF (Portable Data Format) files.

Soon all computers came with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader so that you could view all kinds of files but to create a PDF you still needed the full Adobe Acrobat program, which wasn't free. Of course, third-party providers sprang up to fill the void. Adobe worked then with software companies to enable the creation of PDF files from just about any program, which is the case now.

Why are PDF files so important?

The main reason they became so important was for file sharing but other reasons to use PDFs soon became apparent. If you were sending a contract that was written in Microsoft Word but you wanted to make sure no changes were made to it, you could convert the document to a PDF. Another popular reason to create a PDF is that the file size is much smaller than the file in the native program would be.

Printing a section of a document

The print dialog box has always given you the opportunity to print specific pages. I often scroll down the document, making note of the pages I would like to print so that I don't waste paper. Then when I click on the "print" command I fill in the page numbers as they are in the graphic below. Specific pages are listed separated with a comma and ranges of pages use a dash between the page numbers. Of course, this is not just in a PDF program, this works in virtually all programs.

Printing a portion of a PDF page

OK, so this was the initial problem, you wanted to print just a portion or section of a PDF page. Adobe has given you a tool to do just that. 

1. Open any PDF document and scroll to the area you would like to print
2. From the Edit menu choose "Take a Snapshot"
3. Now drag in your document to select the specific area you would like to print
4. Click the print icon OR choose print from the file menu OR use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + p
5. In the print dialog box you'll notice you have an option to print "Selected graphic", which is your highlighted section of the document and to Scale the selected graphic. I love using the "Fit" command because it will increase/reduce the graphic as necessary to fit on a sheet of paper. You can plan with the other commands in the Scaling section to see which gets the best results for your purpose.

This is pretty dandy stuff but it only works in a PDF document. For other documents, you might want to use the Snipping tool which was described in a previous blog post. Click the link to see the details of that great tool.

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Happy computing!

Diane