Saving Documents and Web Pages as PDFs

Adobe’s PDF format offers a great way to save and send electronic documents, from formatted business letters to product brochures. PDF documents appear identically on all computers, so you don’t have to worry about things like whether the recipient has access to the same fonts as you or if your company logo and other graphics will display properly.

PDFs are also an excellent way to quickly save “snapshots” of web pages for future reference. Since some web pages change frequently, PDFs are a useful way to capture or archive content that might be hard to find again later.

To save a document or web page as a PDF, open it and press Command-P, just as though you’re going to print the page. But instead of clicking Print or pressing the Return key, click the PDF button in the lower left corner of the Print dialog. Choose Save as PDF at the top of the menu, navigate to the location you’d like to save to, and click Save.

The PDF button also contains other useful options. Mail PDF opens a new message in Apple’s Mail program, with the PDF already attached. Encrypt PDF lets you protect your file with a password. And Compress PDF creates a more compressed version of the file — great for emailing large, multi-page PDFs.

Setting High-Quality Fractions

When was the last time you saw a cookbook specify .125 teaspoons of salt? No, in virtually all non-metric publications, this would be written 1/8 tsp. That’s not so bad on a web page, but in print, regular-sized numbers separated by a slash looks clunky and unprofessional. Instead, you should use true fractions, such as ½ and ¼. But how do you get these special characters?

Most fonts contain two or three few special fraction characters, and both InDesign and QuarkXPress 7 offer a Glyph palette that lets you find them by searching through all the characters in the font. You can also use the hidden Character Palette to find these characters in other programs.

But the easiest and best way to get professional-looking fractions is to use OpenType fonts that enable intelligent fractions. When you’re using this kind of font, and you’re using an OpenType-aware application (such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress 7) you can select a regular fraction in your text and choose Fractions from the OpenType menu. (In InDesign, this menu is in the Control panel or Character panel flyout menu. In QuarkXPress, it’s in the Character Attributes tab of the Measurements palette.)

In general, it’s not a good idea to turn on Fractions for a large range of text—you should only apply it to true fractions. The reason: Turning this on can occasionally cause other numbers and some punctuation in your text to shift from its baseline.

Converting a regular fraction is as easy as choosing from a menu, as long as you have an OpenType font that supports this kind of substitution. Note that the regular slash is also automatically converted to a fraction virgule.

Go with the Flow

Leopard gives you the option of viewing your files in an iPod-style “Cover Flow” view—so now you can flip through your files like a stack of CDs. This view is especially useful for searching through photos and other graphics files.

You may already know how to switch Finder windows between Icon, List, and Column views by using the keyboard shortcuts Command-1, Command-2, and Command-3, respectively. (If not, try it! It’s guaranteed to accelerate your Desktop chops.)

To switch a Finder window to Cover Flow view, just type Command-4. You can also change views by clicking the Icon, List, Column, and Cover Flow icons at the top of each Finder window, but key commands are generally faster.

Once you’re in Cover Flow view, here’s how to navigate:

• Click any image to select it and bring it to the foreground. Double-click to open it.
• Scroll through the images using your trackpad or your mouse’s scroll wheel, or by dragging the onscreen navigation bar beneath the images.
• You can flick through the files one at a time using your Down- or Rght-Arrow key to move left to right. Use the Up- or Left-Arrow key to move in the opposite direction.
• If your folder contains many items, you may it find it useful to scroll through the contents without changing your selection. To do so, move your cursor to the list view beneath the cover images, and scroll up and down with your trackpad or scroll-wheel mouse.
• Clicking a Sidebar item in a Finder window jumps you to that location without exiting Cover Flow view. If you browse through certain folders on a regular basis, you may want to create Sidebar icons for them. To do so, just locate the folder in a Finder window and drag it into the Sidebar. To remove a Sidebar item, simply drag it out of the Sidebar.

Create an iCal Event from Apple Mail

Leopard is smart—smart enough to recognize dates within the text of an email in Apple Mail.

When your cursor hovers over a date in the body of an email, a dotted rectangle surrounds the date, and a small arrow appears. Hold on the arrow, and up pop two iCal options: Create New iCal Event and Show This Date in iCal.

Choosing Create New iCal Event generates a dialog box. Its default name is the subject line of the original email, though you can change it here. You can also specify the location and duration of the event and add additional notes. When you’re finished, choose Add to iCal. Leopard adds the date to your calendar—without even opening iCal.

Not sure if you’re available? Choose Show This Date in iCal. This opens iCal at the date in question, but doesn’t add the event to your schedule.

The Instant Email Slideshow

Have you come to dread a certain type of email? You know—the “what we did on our vacation” letter comprising a brief message and a jumble of attached photos?

Here’s how to make quick sense of such missives in Apple Mail, using one of Leopard’s new Quick Look functions.

First, click the Quick Look button in the email’s header.

All attached images now appear in a convenient and attractive slideshow. The icons along the lower edge of the slideshow screen let you play the slideshow, step through the images one at a time, view them simultaneously in a photo grid, expand them to fill your screen, and add your favorites to your iPhoto library. You can also scroll through the images using your left- and right-arrow keys.

Creating Web Clip Widgets

Leopard makes it easy to create a Dashboard widget from a segment of a web page. For example, you can capture a “new releases” list from a media website, or the “latest posts” field from an Internet discussion group. These Web Clips appear, automatically updated, whenever you open Dashboard.

Here’s an example, using www.macmusic.org, a cool music software website. We navigated to their home page in Safari and clicked the Web Clip button (next to the address field).

The entire page darkens save for a bright rectangle. Drag the rectangle from its center and edges until it covers the segment you want to capture. Then click Add and Safari sends your Web Clip to Dashboard.

(If Safari doesn’t display the Web Clip button, choose Customize Toolbar in Safari’s View menu and add the button to Safari’s toolbar.)

Now the Web Clip appears as a new widget in Dashboard. You can still edit it: Move your cursor over the widget’s lower-right corner until a small letter i appears. Click it to resize or reposition the content, or customize its border using built-in styles.

Instant To-Do Lists

Thanks to Leopard, Mail boasts amazing new superpowers. One of the best: the ability to create and manage to-do lists as easily as writing an email.

In fact, you can create a to-do item directly from an email. Simply Control-click (or right-click if you have a two-button mouse) anywhere in the background of the email, and then click the New To Do button that appears.

A yellow field appears at the top of the email. Here you can enter a name for the to-do item, or click the red arrow to set a due date, assign a priority level, or enter the note on a particular calendar.

The item now appears in the to-do list in Mail’s Sidebar. (If you can’t see it, click the triangle next to the word REMINDERS to reveal it.)

Another slick trick: If you select any text from the email before you Control-click to reveal the New To Do button, the selected text becomes the name of the new item. Here we highlighted the book title in the email, then Control-clicked to create a new to-do item.