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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