How to save a document as a PDF (Portable Document Format). Even people without the app you used to create the document will be able to read it as long as they have a PDF viewer, such as preview or Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is especially handy when you just want to save a copy of something without printing it to a conventional printer.
1. On your Mac, open the document you want to save as a PDF.
2. Choose File > Print
3. Click the PDF pop-up menu, then choose Save as PDF.
4. Choose a name and location for the PDF file. Enter the information you want in the Title, Author, Subject and Keywords fields. These fields can be searched later if using Spotlight to find a file.
5. You can choose to set any Security Options you might want - like to set a password on your file before hitting Save to save the file.
6. If you want to make sure your file saved correctly - open Spotlight by pressing Command+Spacebar and then inputting any of the details you entered into the fields in step 4 above. Your new PDF file should show in the list of results.
Combine PDFs in Preview on Mac
Once you start printing to PDFs you'll find yourself with two PDFs you want to combine into a single file. You can combine PDFs saved on your Mac using the built-in functionality of Preview. This feature allows you to combine and reorder multiple pages from multiple PDFs into a single PDF. To do so follow the steps below:
1. Open the preview app on your Mac, by pressing Command+Spacebar followed by typing in Preview.
2. In the Preview App on your Mac, open the PDFs you want to combine by clicking File > Open. You will end up with two preview windows, one for each of your previewed documents.
3. In each open PDF, choose View > Thumbnails to display the page thumbnails in the sidebar.
4. Select all the thumbnails you want to combine (Command+Click) and drag them from the first PDF preview window into the sidebar of the second PDF preview window and release the button to drop them into the first PDF.
5. To save, Choose File > Export as PDF. Name your new file and click Save.
You now have a PDF that contains the content of what were previously separate documents. If you decide later to reorganize the pages, you can open the PDF in preview and move the thumbnails around to suit your preferred order.