[Macworld]

Post your comments for Solve printing problems with Preview here

[liqardliquer]

The print function then to the PDF drop down is the swiss army knife accessory to the mac imo. And goes well beyond Preview for me. Saving docs to so many folders is a God send. I save all of my internet invoices from eBay and everywhere else to folder i have set up. The cats meow

[MacTechAspen]

liqardliquer, on 27 May 2011 - 10:25 AM, said:

The print function then to the PDF drop down is the swiss army knife accessory to the mac imo. And goes well beyond Preview for me. Saving docs to so many folders is a God send. I save all of my internet invoices from eBay and everywhere else to folder i have set up. The cats meow

It is a great way to save serial and registration numbers for software you have download. Since Preview recognizes the text you can copy and paste from the PDF to the app, even years later. This has saved me many times.

And then there is sending PDFs to email from the print dialog.

I am with you, this is one of my favorite OS X features. The rare times I have to use a Windows machine I invariably miss it.

[scottbayes]

<<It is a great way to save serial and registration numbers for software you have download. Since Preview recognizes the text you can copy and paste from the PDF to the app, even years later. This has saved me many times.>>

I don't believe it's "recognizing" the text, as in Optical Character Recognition. It appears to be saving it in compressed form in the .pdf file. When the file is opened by Preview or other programs that support pdf, the text is decompressed and the specified font, etc., applied, ready for selection.

[Biker4Mac]

I've found the "print to PDF" and then print from Preview workaround - but have to admit to being puzzled by it. Printing to a sheet of paper and printing to an electronic (PDF) sheet of paper should have the same results, shouldn't it? But somehow the PDF version ends up different.

Still confused by how it works, but use the trick nonetheless...

[greyone]

The title of this article should be "Use Preview to Solve Printing Problems". Your version of the title implies that Preview is the source of the problem, not the solution.

[aestival]

MacTechAspen, on 27 May 2011 - 03:23 PM, said:

It is a great way to save serial and registration numbers for software you have download. Since Preview recognizes the text you can copy and paste from the PDF to the app, even years later. This has saved me many times.

When you print a page with text, the text is simply saved to the PDF (no character recognition is required, since no actual printing/scanning process takes place) -- I have also used this for serial numbers for years, and it is definitely handy (though most publishers send registration via e-mail these days, and the App Store makes the whole thing moot).

[aestival]

greyone, on 28 May 2011 - 09:54 AM, said:

The title of this article should be "Use Preview to Solve Printing Problems". Your version of the title implies that Preview is the source of the problem, not the solution.

Actually, a better title still would be "Fixing Microsoft's poor programming with straightforward workarounds (part 1138)"

[TimothyA]

Some are going to mock me for this, but I used this trick to get two old technologies to work. I couldn’t get a document to fax from AppleWorks, but the Preview trick allowed me to do it.