Filed under: OS, Software, Odds and ends, Open Source
CUPS-PDF for OS X: Make a PDF "Printer"
Sometimes my students annoy me, particularly when they turn in papers as Microsoft Word documents (but not just then). I have to open each one and go through the Save as PDF dialog over and over again. It occurred to me, however, that computers are good at doing repetitive tasks (that's why I'm the instructor, it only took a couple of years for me to come to that realization). A search yielded this tip from macOSXhints on batch converting Word files to PDF, which in turn lead me to discover the CUPS-PDF Package for Mac OS X, a nice little utility that wraps the CUPS-PDF module in a standard Mac installer. Once you do this you'll have a new "virtual printer" which, when you send it a standard print job, will automatically spit out a PDF to ~/Desktop/cups-pdf/. It's like "Save to PDF," but without having to name the file and choose the location, etc. You can even create a Desktop Printer (as we showed you earlier) and leave it on your Desktop or in your Dock for drag and drop converting.
So if you just want to save a few clicks, or you're interested in automating print to pdf tasks, CUPS-PDF is very handy. It is a free download from Adam Knight at codepoetry.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
CajunLuke said 6:12PM on 3-22-2007
Can't you just take off points if they give you a Word file? Moreover, what's so much better about pdfs? You still have to read them on a screen.
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brian said 5:32PM on 3-22-2007
One of my favorite things to do with a Linux server was to share out 'ps2pdf' as a 'virtual' printer with Samba, as described here:
http://newbox.org/samba.html
Once you've done this, Windows users can use this 'virtual' printer just like any network printer, except instead of creating a printout, it creates a PDF which gets stored on the server. This is very handy since Windows (pre-Vista) doesn't come with the ability to make PDFs as a built-in feature like OS X does.
I did this with ps2pdf in OS X 10.2 or 10.3, following those Linux instructions. It works here, too. Just follow the directions as described to create the printer, then share it out through the normal methods, and voila!--a virtual network printer for Windows clients. I just printed a page from the copy of Windows that's running in Parallels on my MacBook. Printing to a virtual printer from within a virtual machine--recursive enough for you? :-) Depending on your needs, you may want these to go somewhere other than your desktop--for example, if you're offering to this to Windows users other than yourself and *they* want to get the PDFs they create. I'll look into that next.
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JT said 5:49PM on 3-22-2007
Works great, but the output files are much, much larger than with the standard "Save to PDF" function. A 7 page text file, Saved to PDF, was 72KB. The same file, printed with CUPS-PDF virtual printer, wound up as a 284KB file. Almost exactly 4X the size. Ouch.
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Shaaun said 9:39PM on 3-22-2007
Couldn't Automator and Pages do the same thing?
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harsh said 10:22PM on 3-22-2007
You get annoyed because students hand in papers in Word format? I'm 100% pro Apple, but you do realize that MS Word is the standard out there for word processing, right? For you to say you get 'annoyed' when you get papers in Word format is just silly. Your statement annoys me.
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umijin said 10:56PM on 3-22-2007
Well...
I have the same problem with student papers and have required them to all be submitted as PDF files. Unfortunately, the problem isn't students that use Macs. They can handle the PDF button in the Print dialog box. The problem is WINDOZE users. They don't have a way to save as PDF in basic Windows setups. So, I've found a few free options for them. Three are PDF print drivers and one is a website that will convert many file formats to PDF for FREE if the file is under 1MB.
You can see my list here: http://sensei.ad.umuc.edu/cfiedler/otherinfo/savingpdffilesinwindows.html
For Mr. "Harsh", your comments suggest a lack of understanding. MS Word is not a standard format when students don't have Office or even know what their word processor app is. This is true for most of my students. Furthermore, the .docX format can't be opened by the Mac version of MS Word. So, the best way is for them to submit as PDF.
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Rafe H. said 1:03AM on 3-23-2007
"For you to say you get 'annoyed' when you get papers in Word format is just silly. Your statement annoys me."
Requiring that the instructor purchase MS Word to read his student's papers is like requiring all participants in a meeting to bring their typewriters so they can read the memo I'm handing out.
Reading my memo should be free and none of the participants cares at all what tool I used to create it.
Microsoft has made millions from people who are comfortable using Word to read documents. They will spend half that much money suppressing PDF.
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RicoSuave said 2:14AM on 3-23-2007
one useful free pdf printer for windowze is cutepdf.com
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Dane said 8:43AM on 3-23-2007
Making a desktop printer out of the virtual printer here seems like a great idea - but it has some issues.
When I dragged a .doc file over it, it didn't convert that file but instead a file that I already had open in Word. SO it seems like it switched to Word and just 'printed' the currently open document to PDF instead of waiting for the file I wanted to load. Just something to be aware of.
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Mithras said 8:21PM on 3-23-2007
It seriously annoys me that printing to PDF in OS X is not easily Applescriptable. It's even impervious to GUI scripting! It would seem obvious that having a facility for batch-converting documents to PDF would be a useful feature for OS X to offer.
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Maddles said 9:27PM on 3-23-2007
I can understand getting upset over getting given .docX documents from students but .doc is a standard. Everything these days supports .doc (eg. TextEdit)
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sherman said 10:04PM on 3-23-2007
Just open the Word file in TextEdit if Word documents annoy you. I almost never open Word anymore.
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Thomas said 7:34PM on 3-24-2007
Will this allow me to have clickable links in my PDFs? Last time I checked, Adobe Acrobat couldn't do that an the built in PDF creator couldn't do that.
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