If you’re like most people, you print documents to PDF on your Mac. But there are a few things you need to know if you want to print to PDF on a Mac. First, the printer driver needs to be installed on your Mac. You can find the printer driver in the System Preferences panel of your Mac. If it’s not installed, you can install it by going to the Apple website and clicking on the Downloads tab. Once the printer driver is installed, open up System Preferences and click on Print & Scan. In the Print & Scan dialog box, select “PDF” as the output format and click on OK. Now that you have the printer driver installed and set up for printing to PDF, it’s time to create a document in PDF format. To create a document in PDF format, open up System Preferences and click on Print & Scan again. This time, select “PDF” as the output format and click on OK. When finished creating your document in PDF form, save it by clicking on File > Save As… and name it something like “My Document.”
Sometimes you need to print a document, but you don’t have a printer available—or you’d like to save it for your records in a stable format that will never change. In this case, you can “print” to a PDF file. Luckily, macOS makes it easy to do this from almost any app.
Apple’s Macintosh operating system (macOS) has included system-level support for PDF files for 20 years now since the original Mac OS X Public Beta. The PDF printer feature is available from almost any application that allows printing, such as Safari, Chrome, Pages, or Microsoft Word. Here’s how to do it.
Open the document you’d like to print to a PDF file. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, select File > Print.
A printing dialog will open up. Ignore the Print button. Near the bottom of the Print window, you will see a small drop-down menu labeled “PDF.” Click on it.
In the PDF drop-down menu, select “Save as PDF.”
The Save dialog will open up. Type the file name you’d like and choose the location (such as Documents or Desktop), then click “Save.”
The printed document will then be saved as a PDF file in the location you chose. If you double-click on the PDF file you just created, you should see the document the way it would appear if you printed it on paper.
From there you can copy it anywhere you like, back it up, or perhaps save it for later reference. It’s up to you.
