1/15/24, 5:50 PM How to create a PDF file on Mac and Windows - The Verge

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How to create a PDF file / It’s easy — just use your print feature

By Barbara Krasnoff, a reviews editor who manages how-tos. She’s worked as an editor and writer
for almost 40 years. Previously, she was a senior reviews editor for Computerworld.
Mar 9, 2021, 6:20 PM GMT+2 | 0 Comments / 0 New

Now that so many people are working remotely, it’s become more accepted than
ever for official documents to be sent digitally — and most are sent as PDFs.

In case you’re not familiar with the background of that format, PDF stands for
portable document format and was created by Adobe in the early 1990s to allow
people and organizations to create exact digital versions of paper documents.
The idea was that the document was an exact, unchangeable copy of the original
(while some PDFs can now be edited, you can create a PDF that cannot).

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Since then, PDFs have become a standard for sending official documents. If you
need to send something with any kind of legality, you’ll probably be asked to send
it as a PDF.

You can create a PDF from a hard copy document by scanning it and saving the
scan as a PDF. But what if you are looking at an online document and you need to
save it as a PDF?

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It’s really simple, both for Mac and Windows PC users. And it’s done the same
way in both: you “print” the document to a PDF file. These directions are for
printing a web document using the Chrome browser, but this works for any app
that has a print function.

Click on the three dots in the upper right corner.

Click on “Print...”

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To create a PDF, start by going to your print function.

The print window will pop up with a preview box on the left and a series of
features on the right. Next to the “Destination” label, click on the drop-down
menu and select “Save as PDF.”

Make your destination “Save as PDF.”

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If you have a several-page document and you want to create a PDF only using
a specific page or range of pages, click on the drop-down menu next to the
“Pages” label, choose “Custom” and type in which pages you want to save.
(This works exactly the same as if you were sending the pages to a printer.)

It’s a good idea to select which pages you want to save to your PDF.

Note that when you print a webpage to a PDF, you will print the entire page, not
just what is currently viewable in the browser. So it’s a good idea to check in the
preview box what is being printed and only print the pages you need — it’s a lot
harder to edit a PDF document later.

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