pdf writer for mac?

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Let'sgoflying!

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Dave Taylor
is there an equivalent to cutepdf for a macbookpro (mojave)
want to create a pseudo-pdf.
 
Not exactly sure what you are trying to accomplish with PDF's, but we use PDF Expert by Readdle.
 
Ironically, this works for every Mac program except Adobe Acrobat Reader.
 
midlifeflyer said:
Thank goodness! I've been able to save a file as pdf in Windows for at least 20 years. I was amazed to see this question about a Mac!
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Uh...Windows has not had native "print to PDF" support for as long as I can remember without having to install 3rd party software. Maybe it has it today, but it did not a few years ago, and Windows DEFINITELY didn't have native print to PDF support 20 years ago. You always needed to install another program.

OTOH, Mac OS X has had the native ability to print to a PDF for as long as I've used it, no third-party software needed,
 
jesse said:
Uh...Windows has not had native "print to PDF" support for as long as I can remember without having to install 3rd party software. Maybe it has it today, but it did not a few years ago, and Windows DEFINITELY didn't have native print to PDF support 20 years ago. You always needed to install another program.

OTOH, Mac OS X has had the native ability to print to a PDF for as long as I've used it, no third-party software needed,
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Calm down! I didn't say "native." I was referring to the ability, not whether it was native or via third party app.

And yes, Word and the other MS-Office apps produce very nice pdfs natively now. In Word, even with bookmarks.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
But yeah, Macs have had native print-to-PDF for a really long time. That was added to the operating system 15-20 years ago.
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Yep, inherited in spirit from Display PostScript on the NeXT from 30 years ago.
 
GeorgeC said:
Yep, inherited in spirit from Display PostScript on the NeXT from 30 years ago.
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Yeah, I thought it had been in since the initial version of Mac OS X (which is descended from the NeXTStep OS, and still has "NS" at the front of most/all system API calls) but I couldn't remember for sure.
 
jesse said:
Uh...Windows has not had native "print to PDF" support for as long as I can remember without having to install 3rd party software. Maybe it has it today, but it did not a few years ago, and Windows DEFINITELY didn't have native print to PDF support 20 years ago. You always needed to install another program.

OTOH, Mac OS X has had the native ability to print to a PDF for as long as I've used it, no third-party software needed,
Click to expand...

I believe the native PDF fake printer thing showed up on Windows 8. “Microsoft PDF Printer” or some such.

Mac got it when Quartz used it under the hood to render a bunch of stuff on screen as PDF behind the scenes. Screen shots direct to PDF are fun but kinda useless. :)

Linux had Mac and PC beat in this regard, having had a PDF writer in Ghostscript forever... and converters for every file format under the sun a available in ImageMagic...

Have been doing bulk conversions of graphics to fake PDFs on Linux forever.

It’s been a while, but I can whip up a nice looking PDF from a shell script and stick it in cron for reports. LOL.

We have one production machine that does that all day long, concerting various incoming images to “fake PDFs” because PDF and faxes are the lingua franca of the medical works and one of our systems only deals with PDFs. Some faxes still comes in as a TIFF. Ick.
 
Another mac PDF question:

How to edit a PDF file by: cropping a page, adding a page, and deleting a page?

I need to do this after every shop visit, to update the PDF version of my aircraft log books. I scan the logbook sticker, making a PDF file for that one page, which I crop to the size of the sticker, then I add that page to the existing PDF file for my aircraft log book.

I've been using Adobe Acrobat Pro for that purpose, the same as what I use at work on Windows, but my old Acrobat Pro will quit working very soon when I update the MacOS to 10.15 Catalina, due to its lack of support for 32-bit apps.
 
I believe you can do that in Image Preview ... but would have to look it up again
 
NoHeat said:
Another mac PDF question:

How to edit a PDF file by: cropping a page, adding a page, and deleting a page?

I need to do this after every shop visit, to update the PDF version of my aircraft log books. I scan the logbook sticker, making a PDF file for that one page, which I crop to the size of the sticker, then I add that page to the existing PDF file for my aircraft log book.

I've been using Adobe Acrobat Pro for that purpose, the same as what I use at work on Windows, but my old Acrobat Pro will quit working very soon when I update the MacOS to 10.15 Catalina, due to its lack of support for 32-bit apps.
Click to expand...

I think Preview will do that, though I've never used it to crop something that was in PDF format. Otherwise, I can highly recommend GraphicConverter by Thorsten Lemke, available on the app store. He's been developing that for a LONG time, and it's quite a versatile program for a very reasonable price.
 
I seem to remember using Preview for splice jobs like that at some point in the past. Don't know if it still works. Though, like with postscript, if the solution involves editing PDFs, then I've probably already made a wrong turn earlier...
 
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