Courtesy of “Tripp”, here’s a great tip for making it super fast to Print to PDF in any application. Once you’ve set this up, you just press Command-P twice to go directly to the Save as PDF dialog.
- Open the System Preferences app, and then open Keyboard preferences.
In the Application Shortcuts section, select All Applications, and then click the + (plus) button.
Create the new keyboard shortcut. The Menu Title text must be an exact match for the menu item; those three periods are actually a single ellipsis. Copy and paste this into the field if you don’t know how to type one: “Save as PDF…”. You don’t have to use Command-P, but pressing it twice is probably the fastest possible shortcut. It should look like this:
Click Add.You’re basically done. Your All Applications shortcuts should look something like this:
Quit System Preferences.
Now in any application, the new keyboard shortcut is added to the Print dialog:
Save your document to a PDF by pressing Command-P to open the Print dialog, and then pressing Command-P again to open the Save as PDF dialog.
Quick to set up, and it works without any extra software. Sweet!
This is an excellent tip, but I had a small problem with it (which may be peculiar to my system – I have a 32-bit processor, so the latest system I can run is Snow Leopard). When I added the shortcut as described here it seems to have mysteriously made the Cmd-Shift-D shortcut for Send in Mail.app disappear. I just had to put the Send shortcut back in via Keyboard sysprefs, and (so far at least) both shortcuts seem to be OK.