How To Turn Almost Anything Into a PDF On a Mac

While many apps have the option to export as a PDF file, you can actually do it with any app at all as long as there is an option to Print. Even screenshots can be turned into PDFs. You can do this on the iPhone and iPad too.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create a PDF from almost anything on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
Now let's say you're creating or viewing a document or some content on your Mac and you want to save it out as a PDF. There are usually a couple of ways to do that even if it doesn't seem like there is anyway at all. For instance, here in Safari if I see a webpage and I want to save this out as a PDF file I can go to File, and then I can see right here there's an Export as PDF option. So I can simply export this webpage as a PDF. But let's say that Export as PDF wasn't there. There's another way to do it. 
If you go to Print it takes you to the Printout Controls. You usually see a preview here on the left and a lot of different options here. If you look closely at the bottom you'll see a PDF button. In fact it is a button with a little menu attached to it. Now you can click the PDF button, like that, and then you can Save as a PDF. Or you can click this little menu here and you'll see Save as PDF right there as well. Even if you know how to use this already here's a tip that you may not know. If you go to Open in Preview it will create a PDF but not Save it. So it takes this page. Makes a PDF. Now you can see it is there. It is not actually saved anywhere. If I click here you can see it says it's on the Desktop. But you can see I have no file here on the Desktop. I would actually have to go to File, Save to save this. Which is handy because you can actually preview the PDF before you save it. It also allows you, of course, to use Save and then select the location. When you're in Preview you can also go to File, and then Share, and then Share it, say, directly to an email message. So I've got the PDF here yet I've never actually saved that PDF anywhere on my drive. 
But why would you want to use Save As PDF or Open in Preview at all when you've got File and then Export as PDF right here. Well, not all apps have that. For instance if I go to the Reminders App there is no way to export a reminders list as a PDF. But there is File, Print. I'm going to go to File, Print and I get this PDF button here or the menu and I can use Open In Preview, for instance,  and I can see here that I get a PDF that shows me my reminder items. So if I need to actually save a reminders list, maybe to back it up, or to send it to somebody as a PDF I can use this option.
Another example is Calendar. There is no way to export a calendar to a PDF. There is Export but it exports it in different calendar formats. But if you want a PDF you can go to Print and then you get this special menu here that lets you choose the different options for printing. If you continue it goes to the regular Print controls here and there's that PDF button. I can click it or use Save As PDF or Open In Preview to see what it looks like before I print it. 
Sometimes you get different results depending upon what you use. For instance if I were to select these two mail messages. In the Mail App go to File and there is an Export As PDF option. Then I were to Save these to the Desktop. Notice here that I get two files. But if I want these to be together in one PDF I can simply go to File, Print with them both selected like that. I can see in the Preview here, here's the first email message, here's the second email message. Now using the PDF button I can go and have these as a single PDF file. 
To go back to Safari here for a minute I want to show you another tip and another way that printing works different than Exporting as PDF. Say I'm at an article like this one. I want to get a good PDF of it. One of the things you might want to do is to go to View and then Show Reader. In Reader View I can Export As PDF and it will look more like this in the original page. But look what happens when I go to Export As PDF. Then I export it to the Desktop. Then when I go to File, Print and then click the PDF button here and Save it as a PDF that way. I'll call this 2. Now I'm going to get two separate PDF files. This first one looks like this and the second one looks like this. So this is just an example of how a native export as PDF function in an app could produce different results than the Print and then Save As PDF option. 
Now I know I'm going to get questions about how can you do this on an iPhone or iPad. There typically isn't a way to export as a PDF unless you're working in an app like word processor where creating a PDF is a regular goal. But let's say you're in Safari and you want to make this webpage into a PDF. Well, you can start with a webpage. You can also turn On Reader View. So I'm going to show Reader here. Now let's say I want to make this a PDF. If I go to the Share button here you can see there's no option here for creating a PDF. You would think there would be. But there is an option for Print. So let's do that. I'll select Print here. This takes me to the Printer Page just like on the Mac. But there's no PDF button. However, there is that option. So the trick is with that Preview there at the bottom you want to take two fingers, put them on any one of these pages here, and move them apart. Kind of the opposite of pinching. Now you're going to get this preview of what it would look like. Kind of like opening it in Preview on the Mac that we just did. Now you can tap at the top. There's a little button there to the left of Done. Tap that. You get the option to Save To File. So you can save this as a PDF. Or you can tap the Share button at the bottom left hand corner and then that brings up the menu and you could use Save To File right there and save it. 
There's a second way to do it whether you are on the webpage regularly or looking at it in Reader View. Tap the Share button at the bottom center and then tap the Markup Option. This takes you to the Markup Tools. In order for you to mark it up it has to create a PDF version of it first anyway. So now you tap at the top left there and you can see Save To Files there. Or if you just tap Done, now it is going to ask you do you want to Save It As File, as a PDF, or delete it. 
Since the title of this video is Create A PDF From Anything, I'm going to show you how to do it even if you're not in an App. Let's say you just want to take a screenshot of something and create a PDF from it. So here I've got a Finder Window open and let's say I want this to become a PDF. Well you can do it by using the Screenshot Tool. So Shift Command 5 is the default unless you've changed it in your System Settings and I'm going to select the Window option, but you can do the entire screen or a portion. Whichever one you choose go to Options and then you can actually use almost any one of these to start creating a PDF. But the quickest way is just select Preview. So this will skip the floating thumbnail, even if you have it selected, and take the screenshot directly to the Preview App. So I'm going to actually click on this window here. It will take a screenshot of it. It will open it up in Preview. Now it is a screenshot so it is an image. You may just want to keep it as an image. An image is usually fine. So you can just Save this out and you can see you can choose like jpeg or HEIC or png. But you can also choose PDF. I can save this out here and you can see here's the PDF that it saved out. It's just an image inside of a PDF so you're not really gaining that much by making a PDF out of it. But if somebody asks you for a PDF at least you know you can provide that for them. 
Creating a PDF of a document is always a good idea as a way to save a document, like a webpage, for reading later or saving a document out of an app like Pages or Word where you might not know if the person you're sending it to has that app. You know they can always open a PDF. So creating a PDF first and sending it to them is a better way of letting somebody else view a document. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 11 Responses to “How To Turn Almost Anything Into a PDF On a Mac”

Cyrus Dubash

3 months ago

Hi Gary How do we make that pdf look readable or not with tiny print for when viewed in a mobile ? iPhone?

It looks really small and I have to zoom in and keep scrolling left and right. Still finding a way to make it responsive. Thanks !

Gary Rosenzweig

Cyrus: Zooming in is the way to do it. The whole idea of a PDF is that it looks exactly the same for everyone, like a real piece of paper. But a small phone screen means you have to zoom into the portion you want to read. No way around that, it is just the reality of how it works.

Diane

Viewed your video which was very helpful and just today I was trying to save an iPhone text message conversation to a PDF but was unsuccessful. I did it in the past but can't remember how I did it.

Diane: Not easy, perhaps impossible on an iPhone. But in the Messages app on your Mac it can be done, so try it from there.

Ian

In Safari on iOS 17 when I hit the share sheet button at the bottom there is a Print option. Pressing that brings up the Print options with another share sheet button at the top. Pressing that allows me to Save to Files. There's no need for Reader view first.

Ian: The point of going to Reader View first is to get the output that focuses on the article. It is just different than not using Reader View. Depends on what you want.

Diane: I managed to do it a while back by copying and pasting the individual messages into Pages.

It’s not ideal, but works.

Ian I have done that too for a single message. When trying to copy multiple messages select “more” and check the messages but then the copy option is not available. Thanks

Umesh Kumar

Not all previews can be saved as a pdf. In many cases, Save to Pdf is greyed out. But all such files can be opened and saved as Pdf in Chrome Google. I hope one day Apple would match Chrome in this regard.

Umesh: Can you be more specific? I don't know if I've ever seen the Save to PDF button inactive in the Print dialog. Which app are you using and which type of document?

Guillaume

Possibly posted in another Macmost video: keyboard shortcuts can make this ultra-fast!
Go to "System Settings", "Keyboard", "Keyboard Shortcuts...", "App Shortcuts", "All applications".
Add "Save as PDF..." with "command P" as shortcut and "Open in Preview" with "option command P" as shortcut.
Type "command P" then "command P" again to go directly to the save dialog for the created PDF.
Type "command P" then "option command P" to directly open the created PDF in Preview.

How To Turn Almost Anything Into a PDF On a Mac

Comments: 11 Responses to “How To Turn Almost Anything Into a PDF On a Mac”

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