Monday, December 8, 2008

Part 17: Save as PDF

When OS X came out in 2001 it included something that was, at the time, a nifty feature. In the print dialogue you could select, for any document, "save as PDF" which would, not surprisingly, save it as a PDF.

At a time when cross-platform compatibility was not what it is now (it was maybe slightly worse then, it still stinks) PDFs were relatively universally viewable (as they still are). But it's still quite useful, and I use it often.

Today, I learned how to create PDFs on Windows. Since there is nothing built in to XP (Which came out, ahem, a year later.) you have to use third party software. In this case, it has two pop-ups whilst it saves as a PDF unless you pay.

As my coworker put it "You'll get a bunch of pop-ups because it's free."

Has vista remedied this? Or, because Acrobat is not a Microsoft format, have they ignored it?

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