Creating PDF documents on Mac

Sat, 12 April 2008

Mac OS X has an in-built functionality of saving documents to a PDF file. This comes very handy in many situations and it doesn’t cost you a dime, unlike on some other platforms.

This is how you do it. Say you have a document in Apple Pages, a newsletter you have just created and you’d like to save it as a PDF file, so you can email it to the members of your club. In Pages click on File, then on Print, and the following box slides out:

diabox.jpg

Now click on the PDF button and you’ll see a few options. Select Save as PDF, name your file and select where to save it, and click Save. Simple as that.

One of the options I really like is Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder. When I pay for something online and get the payment confirmation page I simply select File / Print / PDF / Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder. The receipt is then automatically saved in ~/Documents/Web Receipts.

You can save a PDF of anything you could normally print; text documents, web pages, emails, screenshots, images, you name it.

One of the options that was available in Tiger (10.4) and has been removed from Leopard (10.5) is to compress the PDF document. However, there is a workaround, which unfortunately is not so obvious. Once you have saved the PDF, open it in Preview, then select File / Save as and from the Quatz Filter drop-down menu select Reduce File Size.

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Category Posted in Mac, Tips

3 Responses to “Creating PDF documents on Mac”

  1. Alexander Abuabara said: Sat, 12 April 2008 at 15:07

    I had copied some script that put the PDF Compress option in the menu again. It’s working very well, but I can’t remember the source of it. I can send you by email. It’s good to have this option. I think Apple should not suppress it because sometimes PDF files can be huge in space.

  2. ghanna said: Wed, 16 April 2008 at 02:47

    All the options in this PDF Menu are just Automator Workflows, they are located in Library/ PDF Services.
    You can create and edit at will with Automator.

  3. norz said: Tue, 27 May 2008 at 21:00

    Note: when doing ’save as pdf’ the author field automatically gets filled with the user’s name (at least in 10.4.11).
    This can be annoying, if you want to post the pdf anonymously, or pseudonymously.

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