Printing to a "Save to PDF Printer"

Is there a way to share a "Save to PDF Printer"? If I had such a printer it seems easy enough to share with cups/samba/etc. I don't have a printer -- what should I use if I just want print jobs to be saved to my local disk?

 

I use an free program called PDF Creator. It allows Windows applications to print to PDF. I save the PDFs to a shared folder on the Mac.

 

I tried PDF Creator once and wasn't too happy with it. It also didn't work too well with a fairly esoteric piece of software I run, so that was the main problem I had with it. Instead, I ponied up the $10 for PDF995. Yes, PDF995 is free, but it has a 10-second nag screen every time you print, and I use it enough to pay for it.

 

CUPS PDF printer

I've not tried this but it is possible to create a printer in the CUPS environment that allows printing direct to PDf. If it works this opens the possibility that this printer can be shared via Bonjour and so made available to Windows. I don't have time to explore it yet, but the details are here: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/print-to-pdf-using-cups-pdf/

Edit: Whoops - that's the Ubuntu version. Here's a Mac version:
http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx

Edit again: Decided to play with this so I downloaded it, followed the instructions and created a virtual PDF printer on the Mac. I then re-installed Parallels 3.0 (again - I've had it uninstalled for a security reasons), used Bonjour to add the new virtual printer to Windows, loaded IE and google.com and printed to the PDF virtual printer. It worked perfectly and dropped the PDF into a folder (cups-pdf) on my Mac desktop. Couldn't possibly be easier and my wife is going to love this for Quickbooks.

 

Great hint, dkp. Of course it took me only two days to realize this works only if you share the virtual printer on the Mac OS X side.

 

Well, ya, that's a given for distributed printing, but not obvious for non-geeky types. Glad it worked for you when you discovered the bit I left out It's difficult sometimes to get balance among beating a topic to death, skimming over critical detail, while avoiding the appearance of talking down to the reader.

 

Awesome -- exactly what I was looking for!

Thanks!

 

Parallels Desktop 9 now includes a Print to PDF (Mac Desktop) printer that is added to the Virtual Windows Machine by default IF "Add all Mac printers" in Configure->Hardware->Print is selected.

When you print from Anywhere in the VM it saves it to the mac desktop. COOL.