Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Where’s Print to PDF on iPhone and iPad?

Rene Ritchie:

When Apple introduced AirPrint to iOS, they made it incredibly easy to send files right from your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to any compatible Wi-Fi printer in the vicinity. Unfortunately, what Apple didn’t do was bring Print to PDF (Export as PDF) along for the ride. At least, not yet...

One of the great features of OS X on the Mac is exactly that — the ability to export almost anything and everything quickly and easily to a PDF file. It’s something I’ve mentioned in the past when discussing OS X Mavericks features that’d be great to see in iOS 8. It’s my understanding Print/Export to PDF was in the pipeline years ago, but simply never got polished and pushed out.

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Which brings up the obvious question: Has anyone developed an AirPrint server so that a WiFi-equipped Mac can pretend to be a printer, take the print data sent from the iOS device, and turn it into a PDF?

A workaround, surely, but one that would work for me 90% of the time I want to do this.

cl

@Chris I believe Printopia and some other apps can do that, but it of course requires that your Mac be nearby when you want to make the PDF. I think there was an iOS app that ran the AirPrint server on the phone, but it got removed from the App Store.

[…] need to reach to go back. I like being able to hard-swipe from the left edge to switch apps. I can finally print to PDF by peeking and popping on the print preview, and there is also a “Save PDF to […]

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