Is there an easier way to get to "Save as PDF" on my Mac?

December 15, 2006 6:42 AM

I really love the baked-in "Save to PDF" function that OS 10 has. I love it so much, that I often have multiple things that I want to save as PDF. It is a little inconvenient/inefficient to go through five or six pages, hit cmd-p, click "PDF", select "Save as PDF", hit return, hit return again, for each file. It would be much easier if I could punch in one key combo and have the "Save" dialog box come up, with "PDF" in the format. Please help. Anyone know a way to make this happen?
posted by grieserm to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Here is a link to the 43Folders post by me.
posted by grieserm at 6:44 AM on December 15, 2006

Is it just one application that you're doing this from mostly, or do you do it from lots of different applications?
posted by chrismear at 6:50 AM on December 15, 2006

I do it from multiple apps, but mainly Word or Firefox.
posted by grieserm at 6:54 AM on December 15, 2006

Here's one way
posted by grieserm at 7:04 AM on December 15, 2006

You may have problems. The PDF Services feature seems to only not to be exposed outside of the printing sub-system.

I was wondering if you could do it with AppleScript but none of the handful of apps whose dictionary I looked at expose the functionality.
posted by schwa at 7:08 AM on December 15, 2006

schwa - You are right. The Printer Setup Utility has been changed and there is no longer an "Advanced" option.
posted by grieserm at 7:18 AM on December 15, 2006

Found the path for 10.4
posted by grieserm at 7:24 AM on December 15, 2006

There is a problem... For some reason the files saved to pdf with the writer are much bigger than the ones done the "old-fashioned" way.
Any input?
posted by grieserm at 7:28 AM on December 15, 2006

Will PDFU help?
posted by Monkey0nCrack at 8:35 AM on December 15, 2006

Have you enabled PDF services? It's not quite "one click", but it's still faster than what you're doing now.

You can add an alias to a folder, and when you choose it in the popup menu it'll dump the pdf there automatically - no file dialog.
posted by O9scar at 8:52 AM on December 15, 2006

Will PDFU help?
Nope... PDFU is Windows only. I'm on a mac.
posted by grieserm at 10:44 AM on December 15, 2006

O9scar, I don't think that applies to 10.4. You can do all of those things out of the box.
posted by grieserm at 10:46 AM on December 15, 2006

Try this: codepoetry - CUPS-PDF Package for Mac OS X. I have not used it in a while, but it will output a PDF into a folder on your desktop. Be aware that it will overwrite an existing PDF, if you print a second document that has the same name as the first.
posted by the biscuit man at 11:12 AM on December 15, 2006

I use that CUPS-PDF Package; you can get around the rewriting issue by changing the settings so it adds a time/date stamp to the PDF filename. Very handy, although it was a little fiddly to set up.
posted by bcwinters at 1:13 PM on December 15, 2006