Drag’n'drop PDF Creation
A useful tool for OSX would be a simple little app which you could drag a file on to (Word, Powerpoint, Graffle), and it would automatically print that file to a PDF. Since PDF creation and viewing capabilities are very well supported in OSX natively, I really don’t want to spend the $99 or so for Adobe’s Acrobat Standard (which is usually much slower and buggier than Apple’s implementation).
I searched Google for an scripts or apps to do this and mostly found things that could merge multiple PDFs or automatically convert only Postscript files. Anyone have any pointers?
Couldn’t this be done through some clever Applescripting?
- examine the file’s creator/type codes to get the right app
- tell that app to print the file to PDF*
Attach the Applescript to a folder as a folder action, et voila!
* caveat: this requires that the app responds to the appropriate AS dictionary entries for printing.
Doesn’t the print dialog already have a “Save As PDF…” button? You can also click on the “Preview” button and do a “Save As…” in the Preview application. Are you trying to do a convert to PDF without having to launch the document’s application?
Yes, I’m trying to do the latter.
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