Aug 3rd, 2008
Economy of Technology: Mac OS X Geek Tip With Frugal Applications
Yes, I’m an Apple Geek (I just came back from Geek summer camp). I freely admit that. Here’s a tip that has some substantially frugal applications that is OS X only as far as I can tellUNIX and Linux and OS X centric.
One of the great benefits of OS X is that anything that can be printed can be made into an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Since I almost never print on paper now (mostly since I don’t edit a newsletter or work on magazine archival projects anymore) my need for a printer has gone down tremendously (I can’t remember the last time I had the laser printer going). However, there is still at least the occasional need for either a printed (or print ready) copy of something, so this feature has been helpful.
To make it even more useful, there’s a package called CUPS-PDF that allows you to set up printing to PDF as your default printer, meaning whatever you’re trying to print ends up as a PDF without even needing to select PDF from the print dialog.
How can this be not just useful but also frugal? Well, besides reducing the amount of paper, toner, and ink you may use there are a few coupon sites on the World Wide Web that are all for your printing their coupons–once. They tend to bypass the usual OS X way of printing. But by setting up CUPS-PDF to be your default printer, it prints a PDF which can be viewed and printed over and over and over again! This might not make the coupon sites happy, but it can be a huge boon for your wallet.
Another example of a way to spend less money with a simple technology hack!
Good tip. I have been using this feature as far back as I have been using OS X. All my online orders are saved this way instead of wasting paper.
BTW, for you Windows users, there are cheap or free apps like CutePDF.