.If a Mac application uses the standard Print dialog box, as virtually everything does, then a PDF can easily be made with the PDF menu button. If specific PDF settings are required, the document can be saved as PostScript then converted to a PDF with Adobe's Distiller or some other program.
Sometimes, however, it would be useful to select a ‘printer' that creates a PDF. This may be useful when:
The Adobe PDF Printer is not available or is unusable from Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6) to Mac OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8). PDFwriter is a printer driver for Mac OS X, which will let you generate PDF files by simply printing. PDFwriter is heavily based on CUPS-PDF. It doesn't use ghostscript to generate PDF files, instead it uses the Mac OS X internal pdf capabilities. Solved: Hello, I've just purchased Adobe CS 6 for MAC, including Acrobat and Distiller (version 10.1.1) I downloaded CS 6 from apple website and installed it. The method for creating PDFs using the Print command changed in Mac OS v10.6 Snow Leopard with Acrobat 9.1 and later. The following procedure describes the method in both Snow Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X.
- Printing from Windows applications running under emulation (where there is no system wide way to print PDFs)
- Using (rare) Mac applications that don't use the standard Print dialog, and therefore don't have the PDF menu button available. InDesign's Print Booklet command is one such place.
- Printing to PDF from Acrobat, something that's not normally possible because Acrobat disallows the options in the PDF menu button, e.g. to remake a PDF with crop marks or to save the contents of a form
- Saving time when making lots of PDFs – with a PDF printer set as default, making a PDF means Cmd-P then Return
Acrobat used to get be supplied with a PDF printer but it no longer works on the Mac due to printer architecture changes. It still works on Windows although it seems Adobe is in agreement with this one that the PDF printer is a bad thing. Some remaining alternatives are:
Acrobat used to get be supplied with a PDF printer but it no longer works on the Mac due to printer architecture changes. It still works on Windows although it seems Adobe is in agreement with this one that the PDF printer is a bad thing. Some remaining alternatives are:
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In fact, PDFwriter uses CUPS-PDF but possibly provides an easier installation. As such, it's worth trying first unless you need a PDF printer that's seen as a PostScript printer, in which case it's no good.
Neither are perfect solutions: you can't choose filename and PDF options like you could with the PDF printer, because command-line programs are being used in the background. PDFs are also made with the standard pstopdf program – the same as when via the Mac's normal way of making PDFs – which means you don't have any idea how the PDF is actually made (e.g. is it suitable for press?).
Perhaps it would be possible to ask the user for a filename and destination by using CUPS-PDF and telling it to run an Automator script that does the asking before passing the result back to pstopdf.
The direct install of CUPS-PDF is more flexible than PDFwriter, but needs more configuration. The CUPS-PDF page links to a easy install CUPS-PDF version, but to get the most up to date version it needs to be installed manually.
Manual installation of CUPS-PDF
- Download the latest source code from www.cups-pdf.de/download
- In Terminal in the same folder as the downloaded file:
tar -zxvf cups-pdf_2.6.1.tar.gz - Follow the instructions in the README file to compile the source code
- Add the new CUPS-PDF printer that has appeared in System Preferences > Print & Scan
As detailed in the README, there are settings to change before CUPS-PDF will work:
- Edit the cups-pdf.conf file (/etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf)
- Change or add the line
GhostScript /usr/bin/pstopdf - Change or add the line
GSCall %s %s -o %s %s - Change or add the line
PDFVer(that's PDFVer followed by a space)
There's no need to restart anything after editing this file.
The default print location is /var/spool/cups-pdf/username. This is easy to change, not necessarily so easy to make it actually work. Set the location in cups-pdf.conf, such as to Out ${HOME}/Desktop to save to your Desktop. Unfortunately this example will fail, with the log file /private/var/log/cups/cups-pdf_log giving the slightly vague message failed to set file mode for PDF file (non fatal) or failed to create directory (/Users). According to somebody on Mac OS X Hints it's due to Mac OS X's ‘application sandbox' security, which prevents the pstopdf program from writing to /Users regardless of what the permissions are. So, leave the files printing to /var/spool/cups-pdf/username and create a link to it.
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Generally speaking, when the sandbox feature is not overriding it, the username must be yours.
By this point CUPS-PDF should now work.
Adding user interaction
It would seem possible to link the program to an Automator script that could ask the user where they want to save the PDF, but it doesn't appear to work. For example:
- In cups-pdf.conf, set
GhostScript open /path/to/test.app --args - In cups-pdf.conf, set
GSCall %s '|%s|%s|%s' - Create an automator application (e.g. test.app). Add a shell script as the first action to pass input as arguments and do:
- Add a Run AppleScript action of:
If you run this app from the command line yourself, it runs the Automator app. It also works if you write your own C program and call the command from there with system(). But for some reason it doesn't work for CUPS-PDF, even though a look at the source code shows it too uses system().
