Print to pdf with Adobe Reader

I'm filling out a PDF form that doesn't work with Preview so I have to use Adobe Reader (ugh). After I fill out the form, I want to print it to PDF so that it is finalized.

Unfortunately, Adobe disables the Mac print to PDF and tells me I have to save as PDF instead, but if I save as PDF then other people can still edit it. My current annoying solution is to print it to paper and then scan it.

Anyone know a way to circumvent Adobe's disabling of the Mac print to PDF feature?

Solution 1:

Adobe Reader 10.x does go out of it's way to hide the normal print options from OS X but you can still get to them by clicking on the Printer... button at the bottom of the Adobe Print Dialog and clicking through the warning not to change things behind Adobe's back.

I don't have a form like you mentioned in red, but try setting all the print options in Adobe to make your form appear as desired (with or without stamps, annotations, sticky notes and summaries, etc...) and then get to the Apple print dialog to attempt a print to PDF.

If Adobe isn't preparing the file for print until after you hit print in the Adobe dialog - then your only recourse is faking it out by defining a new virtual printer. That way adobe is forced to send the data to the mac which will then pop it into a plainer PDF file for you with just the data filled out.

I've not resorted to this, but CUPS-PDF and this tip on making it work with Snow Leopard's sandboxing security looks to be promising. I hope you don't have to resort to that hacky of a solution to save paper waste and time.

Solution 2:

I had the same problem and this is what I did after reading this question and answer

1. I installed a network printer localhost, I chose HP Laserjet Series PCL 4/5 as the driver
2. Print a document from adobe reader

3. Open Terminal.app and type the following:

   sudo -s
   cd /private/var/spool/cups
   ls -lh
   Total 1048  
   -rw------- 1 root _lp 1.6K Jan 18 16:24 c00001  
   -rw------- 1 root _lp 1.7K Jan 18 16:40 c00002  
   Drwxrwx--- 10 root _lp 340B Jan 18 16:40 cache  
   -rw-r----- 1 root _lp 259K Jan 18 16:23 d00001-001  
   -rw-r----- 1 root _lp 254K Jan 18 16:39 d00002-001  
   Drwxrwx--T 3 root _lp 102B Jan 18 16:39 tmp
   

Looking at the timestamp and size, easy to see that d00001-001 and d00002-001 are the postscript files I just printed from Adobe Reader.

4. pstopdf d00002-001

And you have a d00002-001.pdf file, Change the owner of this file then move this file out to desktop (replace username with your actual username)

5. chgrp username d00002-001.pdf

6. mv d00002-001.pdf ~username/Desktop

And there you have it, without having to install any thirdparty pkg or drivers. You can remove the documents from the print queue manually.

just tested on osx 10.11.1 el capitan