Mac OS X Panther, Creating PDF Files And Setting Global Default Paper Size
Most people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat formatted(Portable Document Format or ‘PDF’) files. Its application becomes useful when you want to share a file that allows the receipient to view the file but not edit it. This is most common in educational materials made available to the masses and personal resumes. PDF files also have an innate property that ensures that the receipient views PDF formatted files as they are intended.
Viewing PDF files usually requires an Adobe Reader distributed by Adobe Systems but if you’re running Mac OS X, Apple’s Preview does a much faster and better job of it.
Most Windows machines do NOT ship with the ability to create PDF files and require a licensed Adobe Acrobat application to carry out such tasks but Mac OS X users can create PDF files by creatively using Mac OS X’s PDF capabilities.
Creating PDF Files
Every time you activate the Print function within any Mac OS X application you can save the content of target document as a PDF file by simply selecting the option to ‘Save As PDF’ within your Print preference menu window and selecting where you would like to save it.
When creating PDF files using this method, the caveat to observe is, you cannot later edit this PDF file. So, its probably a good idea to retain a soft copy of the file should you require editing later.
For more advanced functionality, eg setting password access to PDF files, you will need to obtain a copy of Adobe’s Acrobat application. Otherwise, Mac OS X’s integrated PDF file creation ability is a winner!
Setting Default Paper Printing Size
Mac OS X has the ability to set up a single default paper printing size that applies globally within Mac OS X. This saves precious seconds when printing. Some times it also saves paper on those occasions we hit ‘Print’ too quickly before realising the paper size is not set to what we desire. By default Mac OS X’s paper printing size is set to, US Letter. Which is fine if you reside in USA, but for the rest of us, A4 is the most commonly used paper size.
To set your default paper printing size do the following:
- access you System Preferences window by clicking on the Apple logo at the top left of your screen;
- click on Print & Fax to bring up the Print & Fax preference pane;
- click on the drop down menu next to ‘Default paper size in Page Setup’ and select the desired paper size
Once the default paper size has been set, this paper size will be used as default whenever you select the Print option in any Mac OS X application, saving you precious seconds of having to constantly change the default paper size and/or accidentally printing in the wrong paper size when you hit Print too quickly.
If however, you’re using your Mac OS X on a network, please clarify with your network administrator before carrying out this change. There have been known cases where changing this setting led to the inadvertent crashing of the entire network.
