Cups-pdf

| Gabriel |

The “Preview” submenu in the Mac print dialogue is great, but I’ve become a big fan of cups-pdf. I originally installed it because Windows apps running in Crossover/WINE don’t have access to the Preview submenu and so I couldn’t save PDFs from them. However I’ve found that I use it a lot even with native apps, mostly for saving to a “read later” folder. It only saves a few clicks vs using the “Preview” menu but as Amazon’s patent lawyers will tell you, there’s a certain beauty to “one-click.” Note that after you install it, you need to play with it a bit to get it to work in Snow Leopard. Only the first of these changes is described on their page:

1. run the terminal command

   sudo chmod 0700 /usr/libexec/cups/backend/cups-pdf

2. it wants to save to a folder called “~/Desktop/cups-pdf” but I’ve had trouble getting this to work. (as far as i can tell, it’s a permissions thing). My solution is to instead target “/printed-pdf/”. First, create this folder. Second, open the file “/private/etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf” and edit line 43 to read “Out /printed_pdf/”. If you want it on the Desktop, create an alias or use the Terminal command

   ln -s /printed_pdf ~/Desktop/printed_pdf

3. The default driver is grayscale. To get color, don’t choose “Generic Postscript Printer”. Instead, when given that option go to “Select Printer Software” and then choose “Postscript Generic postscript color printer, rev3a”.

Advertisement