How do I print to a PDF file in Mac OS X?

This is a common question and highlights a feature of Mac OS X that's well worth knowing, a feature that in my eyes, at least, is one of the best capabilities of the Mac system. After all, without the print-to-pdf feature, you'd end up having to use a commercial PDF rendering application like Adobe Acrobat, which is pretty expensive and would significantly impact your capabilities too.

Fortunately, it's pretty darn easy to print to a PDF with just what's built in to Leopard or Panther (different versions of Mac OS X).

For example, I'll convert a Web page into a PDF file by opening up the page in Safari, then choosing File --> Print.... This brings up the following dialog window:

Notice the button labelled "PDF" on the lower left. That's the target, so click it. Now you'll see this:

As you can see, there are quite a few choices in terms of how the printer program formats and renders the page you seek to print, but I always just choose Save As PDF.... Now you'll get yet another dialog box:

You can probably leave this all untouched, but I would suggest you rename the "save as" to have a name that you find mnemonic, not algorithmically scraped from another page. :-)

Once you've done that, click on "Save" and a few seconds later you'll have a PDF file that is the rendering of the page or document you were viewing!