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It seems that the size of preview window are fixed, though the window for WORD documents look bigger. And they are always horizontal square boxes that seem to make a consistence with the screen appearance. Is there any principles to design the shape? What would happen if make a vertical window's shape?

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The preview window on my mac is definitely not always the same size (I'm assuming you are talking about the window that pops up when you click on a document and hit the space bar).

For example, if I preview a video, it's wide (just like the video), but if I preview a pdf document, it's tall (just like the document itself).

If the document is rather small, it displays its real size & dimensions.

I do notice that the window is never more than ~1460px wide and ~740px tall on my monitor set to 1600 x 900 resolution.

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hmmm, and why the pop-up window is transparent? – Grace kan May 1 '11 at 23:38
+1 - Adding to what @Ben said, another quick way of proving that Preview windows aren't always the same size is to scroll through a directory with some photos of same total resolution, some being portrait, some being landscape. If you first Preview a portrait when you come across a landscape it will be relatively small. The trick is to double-click the Space and then you'll have a larger landscape Preview. The same thing does not happen in reverse as the Preview window is already wide. – boehj Jun 9 '11 at 17:17
And, you can resize the QuickLook window. – Alex Feinman Jun 10 '11 at 18:26

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