Similarly, Android has distinct “share” and “open with” menus but I mostly use the former as the latter.
Boomers made me hate PDF files
Did you used to love pdf files?
Lol …accurate
I think it’s worse that it’s quicker to take a screenshot of an image online than going through the trouble of saving it.
Tech muggle here.
Could we just get rid of PDFs and switch to word docs and spread sheets instead? I know this will likely cause a slurry of consequences, especially in professional circles, but have you considered: fuck it.?
K thx bye.
No please, microsoft already has a monopoly I’d much rather the standard be open
What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”
Those have different purposes. Word/Excel documents are meant to be editable so that anybody who opens the file is able to add to it, etc. A PDF is effectively the opposite. A PDF is generally meant to be an immutable document that looks the same in any program that you use to open the file.
Excel sheets are rarely accessible to screen readers. Word documents are pretty good, but tedious if you’re just trying to like read something. PDF has the best accessibility support around (except HTML, but thats a whole other can of worms).
exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
Printing, for the rest of us!
I mean, it’s just common sense.
Until you realize that a PDF is literally just a format based around a standard set of instructions used to print documents.
It stands for Print Da File.
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
“safe”
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance…
To be fair, they added stuff to it, like selectable text on a scanned page.
Yeah, if you print to a printer what you’re most often doing is saving it as an Adobe PostScript file and sending that to the printer. PDF is similar, just with extra bells and whistles.
Im not so sure. I bet more than half of the drivers out there produce PCL output, and there are a lot of printers that use other languages too like ZPL and a myriad of others.
You’re not lying. You are printing it as a PDF. Your electronic buddy doesn’t see a difference.
Beyond that, also, what’s so hard about clicking on “File > Export As… > PDF” which is literally in the file menu on LibreOffice at the very least. I don’t know about MS Office, but I would assume it’s the same.
It can produce different results than print to pdf unfortunately
Could you expand on that, I’m curious because export to PDF has always worked flawlessly for me.
I was helping someone and both export and print to pdf each messed up different minute aspects of the design/layout. I don’t remember what exactly it was tho sorrx
Depends on the application. Print to PDF always produces the output as seen on screen, though without things like fillable fields.
Output corruption sometimes persists across all different modes of printing/exporting. Some lines in Word starting to go vertical for no reason is one I encountered a lot, the other is Excel insisting on making every cell it’s own list, and it’s usually fixable only by force rebuilding the file container by saving as another doc/docx type, pushing Word to make it from the scratch and drop traces of accumulated file corruption. Funny enough, some of these bugs can’t be reproduced if opened in Libre, that made me prefer it, when applicable, a long time ago.
Unless you change print options of course, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish it can get really weird.
Print to pdf generally loses the text and just makes it an image though. Which can balloon size and prevent ctrl+f without running ocr on it and saving an additional layer with more mistakes than the original.
Are you sure you don’t have “print as image” enabled there? It should keep it as a layered PDF, not rasterizing.
I’m going to assume you’re on the younger side. That’s a relatively recent thing. For many many years we had to install PDF printers.
Also the PDF printer is generic, but the export has to implemented for each application individually.
Still using it today whenever I need to flatten a PDF with my scanned signature.
I’m in my forties. The post we are talking about was made in February 2026. Priyanka Lakhara definitely looks younger than me, didn’t even make her Twitter account until January 2024.
What does age or how it worked in the past have to do with a post made… four days ago by someone who is either late twenties to mid-thirties at most?
Also, in those old timey wimey years I was just pirating Adobe Acrobat.
The age comment is not about the age of the posts, but about how you seem so surprised about printing as PDF rather than export as PDF.
Using a virtual printer was the norm until relatively recently, and even then it’s still the most effective because anything than can print can use that to generate a PDF.
That’s how I still create PDFs honestly.
Didn’t want you offend, sorry if came out wrong
No offense taken, just confused because I never had this many problems with PDFs, but as I said, I was pirating Adobe Acrobat for a long, long time so maybe I just didn’t run into as many issues.
oop probably meant from websites
Kids today don’t realize how much “printing” to files your computer does.
Just tell them it’s like the Share button on their phone.
This is as much linguistic tomfoolery for humans as it is a con for computers.
I dont know the history, but the most likely case is some microsoft engineer implemented the “print as pdf” option to get around an adobe restriction in the far past, and now we have this weird convention where you can “print” to only 1 filetype to “save” it.
Someone else pointed out that printing to pdf was a universal solution no matter the program. Instead of each program having to make their own export option.
Thats not 100% correct. This didnt use to be an option, nor is pdf the default printing “format” used by printers. Thats more PCL.
“Print to pdf” was added to Windows at some point after PDF became a common file format.
What? I’m saying it was added because it was independent of the program. You could print to pdf from anywhere be it word, or notepad, or tax software, or a browser, or whatever shitty proprietary program you had. Instead of waiting for each of those programs to add an export as PDF option. I have no idea what you misinterpreted that into.
When you are saving it as a .txt file, you are printing it as a .txt file, the computer sees no difference.
I haven’t looked at the printer driver interface on various different operating systens, but I imagine programmatically you don’t write ACSII text directly to it, the way you would with file io calls. Though on Linux you have “lpr” where you can pipe text directly to the command. It’s possible a printer could natively support this, but clearly it would be a different interface to render anything more complex than ascii text.
Not how printing as pdf works but I appreciate the effort
I’m sorry but I am the head of printing operations at work and I can assure you, that is exactly how computers work.
Can we get a second opinion from the head of saving operations?
That department was cut for financial reasons.
Oh! Apologies sir. I didn’t realize you were the one casting the printer summoning seances from that side of the veil. You know if you ever need support you can draw out the four runes on the back of the book.
Err you are handing the file off to a pdf converter programm that acts like a print driver. So yes you are lying to your text programm
pdf is a container format for code parsed by printers. there are no lies, just a virtual printer.
Who remembers printing to a Postscript file and then running that through Acrobat to get a PDF? Back in the 90s when PDFs had to be explained.
But it’s not anymore. All of the main browsers let you save it directly.
How? The only options under “Save” that I see are ways to save the page as
htmlor whatever. Nothing forpdfThe application (or browser functionality) showing you the PDF should offer a button for that. However, the website might customize or replace that application to prevent it to give you a download button.
But, those functionalities (PDF viewing) are mostly in the client, so you need the PDF file locally anyway, so you might find it in the Network tab in the web developer tools (F12).
Oh, I think I understand the confusion here. OOP here isn’t talking about viewing a PDF online and then downloading that PDF file. They are talking about viewing an arbitrary web page (HTML or whatever) and wanting to save that webpage as a PDF file. Obviously, basically any PDF viewer in a web browser offers a simple button to download the file. But if I want to save a PDF copy of this Lemmy thread, for example, the best method is to print the page to PDF.
Yes, I misremembered/misread the original text. Thank you for noticing me.
I discovered on Macs, you can unlock a “protected” PDF this way. Just open the PDF in Safari, File > Print > Save as PDF. It outputs a PDF that’s identical, except it’s unlocked (it doesn’t get converted to a bunch of raster images).
Pretty sure that works on all OSes.
Pdf24 let’s you just mass import pdfs and unlock them without destroying things like bookmarks and the text. I’m sure there’s other similar options.
One time nothing really worked I used a pikepdf python lib. Open file -> Guess pass -> Resave. I was surprised it’s that simple.
Writing that PDF into an USB device or into a new file are basically the same thing…
Or alternatively, why don’t we run with that approach? So many things would benefit from “save to text”. A bit farther afield but why not save to image, save to html, etc.
What? I just click export.
Sometimes people have things saved to Google drive with the setting to save disabled but allow printing. Which means you can just print to pdf. Only case where I can think of where printing to PDF is the easiest option.
