Ubuntu: Printing to PDF

Every so often I’d like to save something as a PDF for future reference. Most often it’s webpages (for my own use), but also other things like documents, spreadsheets and other stuff for distribution in a format which – most likely – is readable by anyone.

It turned out, that using Ubuntu, creating a PDF is pretty straight forward as long as the content is printable. While I do seem to have tried it earlier without any luck, in Ubuntu 9.04 (maybe earlier versions and maybe other Linux distributions), making a PDF of anything is just a matter of choosing “File” -> “Print” and then choosing the printer “Print to file”. Here you have the option to either print to a Postscript file or a PDF. Isn’t that nice.

Sure there isn’t any fancy controls or tools to manage the PDF file or control the generation, but so far, to the use cases I’ve had, it been “good enough”.

print_to_file

comments powered by Disqus