Linux Neophyte

Something I’ve been missing since my migration to Linux is the ability to print whatever I want to a PDF. I find it insanely useful when I want a copy of purchase receipts or just about anything else that I should have a record of. I usually don’t print anything to paper, simply because I’ll just lose it or recycle it and then regret it 6 months later when I need a copy. Enter cups-pdf, a super easy way of outputting “stuff” to PDF.

Installing on Ubuntu 6.10:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Create the printer:

1. From the Gnome System menu, navigate to System > Administration > Printing.
2. Double click on New Printer
3. PDF Printer should already be selected under Use a detected printer, click Forward
4. Select Generic from the Manufacturer drop down menu
5. Select Postscript Printer in the Model section, click Forward
6. Name your printer (I chose PDF-Printer) and click Apply

All set, you can now opt to print web pages, or whatever else to your Cups/PDF-Printer. Ubuntu saves the PDFs to your ~/PDF/ directory (if you want to change the default location, use the last paragraph on this post as a guide).

Installing on Fedora Core 6:

Fedora keeps this package in the extras repo, you can install it using the command below.

su -c ‘yum install cups-pdf’

A few seconds later I had a new printer named Cups-PDF, that when selected would print whatever I wanted to a PDF on my desktop. I personally don’t want all of my PDFs saved to the desktop so I created a PDF folder in my home dir and made a change to the config file:

As root, edit /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf, locate the line that reads Out ${HOME}/Desktop and change it to Out ${HOME}/PDF. I didn’t need to restart the CUPS service to apply the change, it just worked.