Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Saving as PDF

Every Mac OS X application that uses the system’s standard print system renders its pages via PDF before sending them to the print server. While the most common destination thereafter is a printer (by way of CUPS-defined PDF-to-PostScript and PDF-to-raster filters), you can interrupt the print process to preview this internal PDF document, and even save it to disk in PDF format in lieu of actually printing it.

Clicking the Preview button on the standard Print dialog (Figure 8-1) launches the Preview application, which opens the document to be printed in a separate window of its own. While this displays an accurate preview of the proposed printed output, showing margins and page breaks as a real printer would produce them. Select File → Save As PDF to save the preview to disk, as is, as an independent PDF file.

Alternately, you can skip a step and just tell the Print dialog to print to a file instead of a printer, simply by hitting the standard dialog’s Save As PDF button. You can also save any document in raw PostScript format: under the Print dialog’s Output Options pane (Figure 8-9), activate the Save As File checkbox, and select a file format from the Format pop-up menu (either PDF or PostScript).

Figure 8-9. The Print dialog’s Output Options pane

Because every modern operating system can read PDF documents (through Apple’s Preview, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, the open ...