Print Directly To PDF in Ubuntu 8.04
In a release long, long ago and in a galaxy far, far away I blogged about how to configure Ubuntu to print directly to a .pdf file. Looking back to this article it appears to be outdated an in need of some corrections. This tutorial will outline how to use and, if needed, configure your Ubuntu 8.04 machine to print directly to a .pdf file.
Verifying Setup or Print to PDF Configuration
My Ubuntu 8.04 installation was already configured, out of the box, to print to .pdf. This means, without any additional configuration I could select “Print” from an application and the output would be generated into a .pdf file and saved to disk. You can verify whether or not your machine is configured the same way by Navigating to:
System > Administration > Printing
If you already see a Local Printer listed as “PDF” then your machine is already configured as well. If, for whatever reason, this is not the case for you this can be configured as follows.
- Install the cups-pdf package using:
sudo aptitude install cups-pdf - Select “New Printer”
- Select “Print into PDF file” with the device URI of “cups-pdf:/”
- Select “Generic”
- Select “PDF file generator”
- Assign a name. “PDF” should be sufficient.
- Select “Apply”
Again, I would be surprised if this is not configured on your machine by default, but I never can tell what some of you have done to your machines 
Printing Directly to PDF
Once you have verified your machine is configured properly you should now be able to print documents directly to a .pdf file. This should include text documents, web pages, etc. Simply select “PDF” as the printer when you want to print a document.
After a print job has been sent you can find the generated .pdf file in your users Home folder within a new directory called “PDF”.
