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

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

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:42:54 -0800

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?

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:44:58 -0800

Here is a link to the 43Folders post by me.

By: chrismear

chrismear — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:50:06 -0800

Is it just one application that you're doing this from mostly, or do you do it from lots of different applications?

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:54:52 -0800

I do it from multiple apps, but mainly Word or Firefox.

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:04:34 -0800

Here's one way

By: schwa

schwa — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:08:23 -0800

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.

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:18:36 -0800

schwa - You are right. The Printer Setup Utility has been changed and there is no longer an "Advanced" option.

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:24:31 -0800

Found the path for 10.4

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:28:57 -0800

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?

By: Monkey0nCrack

Monkey0nCrack — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:35:52 -0800

Will PDFU help?

By: O9scar

O9scar — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:52:14 -0800

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.

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:44:05 -0800

Will PDFU help?
Nope... PDFU is Windows only. I'm on a mac.

By: grieserm

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:46:52 -0800

O9scar, I don't think that applies to 10.4. You can do all of those things out of the box.

By: the biscuit man

the biscuit man — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:12:05 -0800

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.

By: bcwinters

bcwinters — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:13:25 -0800

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.