You're not lying. You are printing it as a PDF. Your electronic buddy doesn't see a difference.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Beyond that, also, what's so hard about clicking on "File > Export As... > PDF" which is literally in the file menu on LibreOffice at the very least. I don't know about MS Office, but I would assume it's the same.
It can produce different results than print to pdf unfortunately
Could you expand on that, I'm curious because export to PDF has always worked flawlessly for me.
Depends on the application. Print to PDF always produces the output as seen on screen, though without things like fillable fields.
Unless you change print options of course, depending on what you're trying to accomplish it can get really weird.
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I was helping someone and both export and print to pdf each messed up different minute aspects of the design/layout. I don't remember what exactly it was tho sorrx
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I'm going to assume you're on the younger side. That's a relatively recent thing. For many many years we had to install PDF printers.
Also the PDF printer is generic, but the export has to implemented for each application individually.
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Kids today don’t realize how much “printing” to files your computer does.
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This is as much linguistic tomfoolery for humans as it is a con for computers.
I dont know the history, but the most likely case is some microsoft engineer implemented the "print as pdf" option to get around an adobe restriction in the far past, and now we have this weird convention where you can "print" to only 1 filetype to "save" it.
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Until you realize that a PDF is literally just a format based around a standard set of instructions used to print documents.
It stands for Print Da File.
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Reminds me of Arnold's guide to tar:
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
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Yeah, if you print to a printer what you're most often doing is saving it as an Adobe PostScript file and sending that to the printer. PDF is similar, just with extra bells and whistles.
It was like that back in the eighties, until the manufacturers decided to save on the chips by moving functionality into the drivers. Which was basically the start of everyone's problems with printers.
Im not so sure. I bet more than half of the drivers out there produce PCL output, and there are a lot of printers that use other languages too like ZPL and a myriad of others.
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"Print to file" to create a PDF, but it's Microsoft's stupid alternative format. Can't even remember its name, nobody used it.
Fucking xps format. Like almost everything Microslop had touched, it can burn in software hell
Agreed! I remember back in the day when they first created the docx format. Such bloated garbage. I think an empty file was like 100-200 KB. And PowerPoint files are unreasonably huge too
I remember seeing an article about how the xlsx format description was several hundred pages in length.
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exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
I mean, it's just common sense.
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Similarly, Android has distinct "share" and "open with" menus but I mostly use the former as the latter.
Laughing in LaTeX
I think it's worse that it's quicker to take a screenshot of an image online than going through the trouble of saving it.
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
Boomers made me hate PDF files
the world is run by PDF files
And the people who can't open them
people will call you dumbass because you don't use AI but they can't open a pdf file
From my time in tech support I know there are two kinds of cases where people can't open a PDF. In one group, the PDF is broken, usually an interrupted download or otherwise corrupted file. The other group, well, one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time.
one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time
They can't. These are the people who have a family reunion in the middle of aisle 6 in the grocery store because the haven't seen little Breighlynne since she was this big! We need to get together sometime so all the--
You need to get the hell away from the tortilla chips before I justifiably crash out!
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But it's not anymore. All of the main browsers let you save it directly.
How? The only options under "Save" that I see are ways to save the page as html or whatever. Nothing for pdf
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I discovered on Macs, you can unlock a "protected" PDF this way. Just open the PDF in Safari, File > Print > Save as PDF. It outputs a PDF that's identical, except it's unlocked (it doesn't get converted to a bunch of raster images).
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Who remembers printing to a Postscript file and then running that through Acrobat to get a PDF? Back in the 90s when PDFs had to be explained.
I can think of several ways I can print a word file to pdf. In the rare occasions I might need a pdf to share. But what I mean is pdf sucks and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet
It's a fine format for what it's intended for, exact preservation of content, format, and layout. Once you start looking at a the immutable archivist/distribution format and start thinking to yourself "I'd rather like to edit that" then you've messed up.
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