Now that so many people are working remotely, sending official documents digitally is more accepted than ever, and many are sent as PDFs.
If you’re not familiar with the background of this format, PDF stands for portable document format and was created by Adobe in the early 1990s to allow individuals and organizations to create fully digital versions of paper documents. The idea was that the document was an exact, unalterable copy of the original (although some PDFs are now editable, you can create a non-editable PDF).
Since then, PDFs have become the standard for sending official documents. If you need to submit something with any legality, you will likely be asked to submit it as a PDF.
You can create a PDF by scanning from a hard copy document and saving the scan as a PDF. But what if you’re looking at a document online and need to save it as a PDF?
It’s really simple for both Mac and Windows PC users. And both are done the same way: you “print” the document to a PDF file. These instructions are for printing a web document using the Chrome browser, but this applies to any application with printing functionality.
- Click on the three dots in the upper right corner.
- Click on “Print…”.
- The print window opens with a preview box on the left and a set of features on the right. Next to the “Destination” label, click the drop-down menu and select “Save as PDF”.
- If you have a document with several pages and you want to create a PDF using only a specific page or range of pages, click the drop-down menu next to the “Pages” label, select “Custom” and type which pages you want. I want to save. (This works as if you were sending pages to a printer.)
Note that when you print a web page to PDF, you print the entire page, not just what can be viewed in a browser. So it’s a good idea to check what’s printing in the preview box and only print the pages you need – it’s much harder to edit a PDF document later.
