How to create a PDF file on Mac and Windows

With so many people working remotely, it’s becoming more acceptable than ever for official documents to be sent digitally – and most being sent as PDFs.

If you do not know the background of the format, PDF stands for portable document format and was created by Adobe in the early 1990s to enable people and organizations to create accurate digital versions of paper documents. The idea was that the document was an exact, immutable copy of the original (although some PDFs can now be edited, you can create a PDF that cannot).

Since then, PDFs have become the standard for sending official documents. If you need to submit something legally, you will probably be asked to submit it as a PDF.

You can create a PDF from a hard copy document by scanning it and saving the scan as a PDF. But what if you look at an online document and need to save it as a PDF?

It’s very simple, for both Mac and Windows PC users. And this is done in both ways: you ‘print’ the document to a PDF file. These instructions are for printing a web document using the Chrome browser, but they work for any app that has a print function.

• Click on the three dots in the top right corner.
• Click on “Print …”

• The pop-up window appears with a preview window on the left and a range of functions on the right. Click the menu next to the “Destination” label and select “Save as PDF.”

• If you have a document with a number of pages and you only want to create a PDF with a specific page or series of pages, then click on the menu next to the label ‘Pages’, select ‘Custom’ and type the pages you want save. (It works exactly the same as sending the pages to a printer.)

Note that when you print a web page to a PDF, you will print the entire page, not just what is currently visible in the browser. It is therefore a good idea to check in the sample box what is being printed and only print the pages you need – it is much more difficult to edit a PDF document later.