So I have a question for all the Mac users who read my weblog.
Since moving to the Mac, one thing I’ve really liked is the “print to PDF” feature of Safari and Firefox and any browser. It essentially allows me to save websites, articles, etc. as PDFs, which are nice for printing.
Now with Tiger, I can search all those PDF’d articles and websites with Spotlight.
Does anyone else do this? I find it very handy, especially for news articles that go behind subscription firewalls like the NYTimes does after 10 days or whatever.
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I have a Mac and the native PDF creator is great; you can create a PDF faster than if you used Adobe Acrobat. However, if you are looking to archive content, categorize, share, and search it — even behind subscription firewalls — then you should use Yahoo!s MyWeb service, http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myresults/benefits. In addition to saving the link itself, it caches the page for a permanent copy of that content. The Y! Firefox toolbar has a convenient MyWeb button to make saving pages even easier, http://toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox. This is much easier and more convenient than constantly creating PDFs that can only be accessed on one computer while Y!MyWeb will allow you access to that content anywhere with internet access. And of course you can conserve more space on your hard drive.
I didn’t know this applied to browsers, but I guess I should have. In any case, thanks for the tip.
In my case, this feature has saved more than a few trees. I ‘print to PDF’ extensively for archiving docs, proposals, receipts, delivery info that I have received electronically, basically anything I may need to document later-most of which I use to print and file hard copy-as well as to save webpages. Quite often, I use this function to email PDFs of websites rather than a link, so they will be available for off-net viewing. The person who sold me my PB thought this quite a differentiator for Mac.
I might add that you can also use the text viewer installed in Tiger to read and add notations to the document.
I find this rather perfect for highlighting segments you want other people to discuss or to jot down quick notes for lookup later.
Also Spotlight is perfect for looking up these files if you later find the need to quote or properly document some part of your reading.
I really love PB and am very satisfied. I also bought my mac here in Japan.