Mac Curious?

For some design and business professionals, this one feature is enough to send them running to the Apple Store to buy a first Mac.

Built into Mac OS X since the very beginning is the ability to save any file that you can print to a PDF. For the uninitiated, PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is the absolute choice to send a document to colleagues, regardless of their operating system. PDF viewers are available for free on Mac, Windows, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile, the upcoming iPhone and more.

The beauty with PDF is that it retains all of the fonts and formatting from the original computer, meaning that your recipient can have a completely different setup or set of applications, and they will see the file as you intended. Anyone who has ever spent hours prettying up a Word document and learned that their boss received it as a jumbled mess of Courier text will surely understand the joy of PDF.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Finish your document (again, any application on the Mac works with this tip)
2. Save the document
3. Go to the File Menu, and click Print (or use Apple-P)
4. (Optional: choose a printer from the dropdown menu to format exactly for one of your printers)
5. Choose the PDF menu in the lower-left corner of the window
6. Choose “Save as PDF”
7. Select where to save

That’s it!

Bonus for Graphics People: Under “Save as PDF” is an option called “Save PDF as PostScript”.
Extremely handy for those folks dealing with print graphics.