this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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You're not lying. You are printing it as a PDF. Your electronic buddy doesn't see a difference.
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.
Output corruption sometimes persists across all different modes of printing/exporting. Some lines in Word starting to go vertical for no reason is one I encountered a lot, the other is Excel insisting on making every cell it's own list, and it's usually fixable only by force rebuilding the file container by saving as another doc/docx type, pushing Word to make it from the scratch and drop traces of accumulated file corruption. Funny enough, some of these bugs can't be reproduced if opened in Libre, that made me prefer it, when applicable, a long time ago.
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
Print to pdf generally loses the text and just makes it an image though. Which can balloon size and prevent ctrl+f without running ocr on it and saving an additional layer with more mistakes than the original.
Are you sure you don't have "print as image" enabled there? It should keep it as a layered PDF, not rasterizing.
I probably did. Think I've had some things not print correctly without that on an actual printer so I turned that on sometimes?
I deliberately use the print as image feature if I don't want someone to be able to select text or search the document (like if I'm sending something with sensitive info as an attachment to an email). Most of the time, I have that option disabled so the document can be searchable and text can be copied from it.
fwiw its trivial to OCR it. single click in many pdf software.
but I guess it slows down some people
Right...the idea isn't to make it foolproof, it's just to make a barrier. People generally go for easier targets over ones with a small barrier. If you have two bikes next to each other in public, one with a bike lock and one with no lock at all, the casual thief is way more likely to steal the one without a lock. Bike locks can easily be broken, but they serve as a deterrent.
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.
CutePDF was the best.
https://cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp
Started out with it in XP.
Just reading that name made my articulations ache.
It's great is still active though.
Still using it today whenever I need to flatten a PDF with my scanned signature.
Why do you need to flatten it?
So that the recipient can't tell it was an image I pasted onto the pdf instead of a page I printed, signed, then scanned in again.
I'm in my forties. The post we are talking about was made in February 2026. Priyanka Lakhara definitely looks younger than me, didn't even make her Twitter account until January 2024.
What does age or how it worked in the past have to do with a post made... four days ago by someone who is either late twenties to mid-thirties at most?
Also, in those old timey wimey years I was just pirating Adobe Acrobat.
The age comment is not about the age of the posts, but about how you seem so surprised about printing as PDF rather than export as PDF.
Using a virtual printer was the norm until relatively recently, and even then it's still the most effective because anything than can print can use that to generate a PDF.
That's how I still create PDFs honestly.
Didn't want you offend, sorry if came out wrong
No offense taken, just confused because I never had this many problems with PDFs, but as I said, I was pirating Adobe Acrobat for a long, long time so maybe I just didn't run into as many issues.
oop probably meant from websites
Well, but we're not just talking about Office. What about browsers, document viewers, etc.
My browser saves PDFs fine?
How about notepad. Or paint.
Postscript (not the P in PDF, even though I think it should have been) is how Portable Document Format is made.
PostScript’s original purpose was for formatting documents to print with laser printers, but to also interpret font hinting and display features for lower resolution printing. But it required printers to process them before rasterization.
It was so good at this that it made sense to also use it for the much lower resolution of computer screens once computers were powerful enough to do the rasterization themselves. Hence the PDF replacing most .PS (PostScript) files, unless you were a graphic design student in the late 90s.
Oh boy, here i go learning again
Kids today don’t realize how much “printing” to files your computer does.
Heh, we were doing some cosigner banking and I asks my one adult kid to send me the bank documents needed (they were pdf files on their computer). They sent me low res screen shots. Lol
Just tell them it's like the Share button on their phone.
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.
Someone else pointed out that printing to pdf was a universal solution no matter the program. Instead of each program having to make their own export option.
Thats not 100% correct. This didnt use to be an option, nor is pdf the default printing "format" used by printers. Thats more PCL.
"Print to pdf" was added to Windows at some point after PDF became a common file format.
What? I'm saying it was added because it was independent of the program. You could print to pdf from anywhere be it word, or notepad, or tax software, or a browser, or whatever shitty proprietary program you had. Instead of waiting for each of those programs to add an export as PDF option. I have no idea what you misinterpreted that into.
When you are saving it as a .txt file, you are printing it as a .txt file, the computer sees no difference.
Not how printing as pdf works but I appreciate the effort
I'm sorry but I am the head of printing operations at work and I can assure you, that is exactly how computers work.
Can we get a second opinion from the head of saving operations?
That department was cut for financial reasons.
Then you already know this:
I love that the goat sacrifice is before replacing the cable...
Oh! Apologies sir. I didn't realize you were the one casting the printer summoning seances from that side of the veil. You know if you ever need support you can draw out the four runes on the back of the book.
I haven’t looked at the printer driver interface on various different operating systens, but I imagine programmatically you don’t write ACSII text directly to it, the way you would with file io calls. Though on Linux you have “lpr” where you can pipe text directly to the command. It’s possible a printer could natively support this, but clearly it would be a different interface to render anything more complex than ascii text.
Err you are handing the file off to a pdf converter programm that acts like a print driver. So yes you are lying to your text programm
pdf is a container format for code parsed by printers. there are no lies, just a virtual printer.