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.
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.
Why do you need to flatten it?
So that the recipient can’t tell it was an image I pasted onto the pdf instead of a page I printed, signed, then scanned in again.
Just reading that name made my articulations ache.
It’s great is still active though.
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
Well, but we’re not just talking about Office. What about browsers, document viewers, etc.
My browser saves PDFs fine?
Kids today don’t realize how much “printing” to files your computer does.
Heh, we were doing some cosigner banking and I asks my one adult kid to send me the bank documents needed (they were pdf files on their computer). They sent me low res screen shots. Lol
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.
Postscript (not the P in PDF, even though I think it should have been) is how Portable Document Format is made.
PostScript’s original purpose was for formatting documents to print with laser printers, but to also interpret font hinting and display features for lower resolution printing. But it required printers to process them before rasterization.
It was so good at this that it made sense to also use it for the much lower resolution of computer screens once computers were powerful enough to do the rasterization themselves. Hence the PDF replacing most .PS (PostScript) files, unless you were a graphic design student in the late 90s.
Oh boy, here i go learning again
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of Arnold’s guide to tar:
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
“safe”
For those not in the know… PDF is a particular set of conventions for delivering peograms written in a programming language called “Postscript”, and like all programs they can be hijacked to trigger unexpected results, including the delivery of software viruses. And yes, while those programs run in “sandboxes” that are supposed to prevent propagation of harm, such environments can fall in that purpose due to creative triggering of imperfections in the sandbox code by the “contained” Postscript code.
Hence, quotes are used to convey lack of trust in the claim of safety.
Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them
(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.
Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”
I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance…
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.
It was like that back in the eighties, until the manufacturers decided to save on the chips by moving functionality into the drivers. Which was basically the start of everyone’s problems with printers.
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.
Apple‘s AirPrint standard for wireless printing is pretty much sending a PDF over IPP.
To be fair, they added stuff to it, like selectable text on a scanned page.
Right, as another user said, it’s similar to postscript but with bells and whistles.
“Print to file” to create a PDF, but it’s Microsoft’s stupid alternative format. Can’t even remember its name, nobody used it.
exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
I mean, it’s just common sense.
Printing, for the rest of us!
Laughing in LaTeX
Laughing harder in Typst
Really want to migrate, but LyX is too good to give up…
I see you too are a person of culture.
Dude, LaTeX one of the worst piece of software that is still prevalent today, perhaps the only thing worst is Microsoft Word (and similar WYSIWYG thingy).
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
Because of anonymity, I am gonna voice some strong opinions ;) These tools feels very much like the typical products of “west-coast PL”: they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture” and “engineering culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
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.
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
Boomers made me hate PDF files
the world is run by PDF files
And the people who can’t open them
people will call you dumbass because you don’t use AI but they can’t open a pdf file
From my time in tech support I know there are two kinds of cases where people can’t open a PDF. In one group, the PDF is broken, usually an interrupted download or otherwise corrupted file. The other group, well, one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time.
one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time
They can’t. These are the people who have a family reunion in the middle of aisle 6 in the grocery store because the haven’t seen little Breighlynne since she was this big! We need to get together sometime so all the–
You need to get the hell away from the tortilla chips before I justifiably crash out!
Preach
Adobe made me hate pdf files.
Did you used to love pdf files?
Back when they were cool
How much more do we need to pick your brain in order to determine whether or not you understand the double entendre?
I enjoy single entendres, I’m not greedy
Is that a JE reference?
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).
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.
I can think of several ways I can print a word file to pdf. In the rare occasions I might need a pdf to share. But what I mean is pdf sucks and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet
It’s a fine format for what it’s intended for, exact preservation of content, format, and layout. Once you start looking at a the immutable archivist/distribution format and start thinking to yourself “I’d rather like to edit that” then you’ve messed up.
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.
We should. It’s a good abstractions for document conversion.
Lol …accurate
What? I just click export.
