Select a region

Drags out a rectangle on the page. It draws a selection, not a mark. Nothing is added to the document by using it.

It is named for what it does rather than for any one use, because the same rectangle says what to crop to, what to recognise text in, and what to lift out into a document of its own.

What a region can then be used for

• Crop to the selection (⌘K). Uncrop puts it back.
• Recognise the text in it, on a page that is a picture.
• Copy the text in it.
• Make a note from it.
• Extract it into a document of its own.
• Black it out. See Blacking out.
• Capture a signature from it. See Signing.

For blacking out you do not have to draw a region at all. Selecting the words works too, and is usually better: it gives one rectangle per line that follows the text, rather than one box swallowing everything between.

This tool is tenth on the strip, and 0 arms it. The digits run out at nine, so the tenth tool takes the nought.

Research ▸ Copy the Words in the Region (⌃⌘C), which is the Copy Region button on the bar, puts the words inside the rectangle on the clipboard.

Extract asks where to put the new document through an ordinary save panel. The page it writes is sized exactly to the rectangle you dragged, not to a full page with the rectangle on it. The sheet is the rectangle.

If no rectangle is drawn, the status line says Select a region first, with the region tool rather than doing nothing. Extracting adds or a closed shape, because a drawn outline will do for that one.

Cropping removes what is outside the rectangle from the file. It does not merely hide it. The sheet's own boundary becomes exactly the rectangle you asked for, and nothing outside it, text included, survives in the file for another reader to bring back.

The application asks before doing it:

Crop 1 page(s) and remove the rest? Everything outside the rectangle is taken out of the pages themselves, not hidden - no other reader will be able to bring it back. Nothing is written until you save, and Undo puts it back until then.

with Crop, Crop a Copy…, Cancel, and a Do not ask again box.

Recognising text in a region makes it part of the document, not a separate note about it. A page that is only a picture answers no search until it has been recognised, and finds every word afterwards.

Recognising a whole document is a different command, described on Working with pages. A rectangle drawn here wins over it: with one on the page, that command reads the rectangle rather than the document, so it does not matter which of the two you press.

Any recogniser can lose small details, such as a space before a hyphen. Recognised text is a reading of the picture, not the original typing, so search for a distinctive word rather than an exact phrase.

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

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