Print to PDF in Fedora

A very useful and nice thing in Apple’s OS X, is that you can print to a PDF file from any program. This can also be achieved under Windows with PDFCreator. At its core, it’s “nothing more” than a virtual printer. I use this feature a lot, so how can this be done in Fedora 8? How hard can it be?

Well, it’s easy, fire up a terminal as root and type:

  • /etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start : the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) service needs to be started if you wish to have the pdf-printing support. I recommend that you start it automatically at boot time.
  • yum install cups-pdf : installs the pdf-printing component for CUPS

You’re done, now you can print to the CUPS/CUPS-pdf printer from almost any program, including Firefox. Neat to save web pages.

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