Set A PDF Printer As Your Default

by Jason Faulkner on May 2, 2009 | 8 comments

Many of you probably have a PDF printer installed on your machine (if not, you should get a free one such as CutePDF or PDF Creator). If so, set it to your default if it is not already.

The reason is simple: if you accidentally print something to a paper printer you waste the paper and ink it comes out on. On the other hand, if you accidentally print something to PDF, no harm.

Unless you do an unusually large amount of printing, you probably will not even notice the difference.

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MartYn
Or just make sure you need to print something before pressing the print button? Otherwise if you set PDF printer as your default, then every single time you need to print something you have to watch it make your pdf, then cancel/delete that then set your printer to an ‘actual’ printer, then you get your print out. What a long way round.

http://www.twitter.com/AndrewPearce Drew
Actually, that’s incorrect. I have Adobe Acrobat set to default for my printing. The options window pops up so you can change any or the printer settings and all you need to do is click once on the actual printer you wish to print to and then click OK.
The only time it will create the PDF is if you actually select OK after you’ve clicked the ‘Print’ option.

http://twitter.com/jamesdelong James Delong
I stay away from printing all together. I leave that bad boy unplugged. For my business I rarely need to print something out, maybe a confirmation printout when flying but other than that I do have the pdf printer set as my default. (I find out half the time I print something physically out that I dont need it. I think it’s the whole tangible thing with my, that’s why I will pay extra for someone’s real book instead of an ebook)
Al King
I think its a good idea. So many times I print something and there are 1 or two extra pages with little on them. As a PDF one can see the info one needs and print “page 2 of 3″ for instance.
Sure you gotta take a couple of extra steps but you save ink and paper.

MartYn
Or use greenprint, another free option for saving paper and ink

True Falcon
I find it much simpler to be in the habit of clicking print preview on everything before actual printing. If there is going to be unneeded or blank pages, it’s easy to just actual print a range And you don’t collect all those PDFs somewhere that have to be cleaned up.
Actually, for me, it’s seldom a click. I’m a keyboarder and I know the keyboard shortcut for ‘print preview’ in all my progs and the print preview has a shortcut key to the real printer.
Greg
PDF Creator is free for the first 30 days ONLY.