Keeping Track of Everything You Print
A few weeks ago, I was staring at my browser which was presenting me the now ubiquitous receipt page after buying something online. That page was, as is so common, recommending that I "print this page for your records".
The thing is that I usually don't really want a printed copy of it, despite really wanting to keep a copy. As I was on my Linux laptop, I just printed it to PDF. That way, I have a copy of it in a form that matches what I would have gotten if I had printed it. I could have saved the HTML page, but like the single document approach of PDF for this.
On my Mac laptop, this is just as easy and on Windows not much harder. Both Ubuntu and Mac OSX make it really easy to have a PDF printer. However, what I noticed as I went to print this particular receipt to a PDF was that on none of my machines was this PDF printer the default printer.
Because of that, I was only getting a PDF when I saw in advance that I might want one instead of printing it for real. That sparked a bit of curiosity in me. What would happen if I made the PDF printer my default and sent everything through there first.
So, for the past few weeks, that's been the setup on all of my workstations. The results make it clear that I want to make this the default setup from here on out for a few reasons.
First is the number of times where I printed something to PDF, sent it to the printer marked up the printout and eventually dropped the paper into the recycling only to go looking on my desk for that printout a couple of days later. No problem, since the PDF was sitting in my PDF output directory.
It's also become a really decent way to save a web page article or snapshot of a document in an easily retrievable format. When combined with my recent JungleDisk installations on all of those machines and the automatic backups that include those PDF directories on all of the machines, I now have access to anything I've printed or wanted to keep, no matter where I was when I printed it.
While I still use bookmarking engines quite a bit for marking things to find later, it's happened more often than I am comfortable with that the page/article in question goes away by the time I want it a few months down the road: not the case with exported PDF's.
Finally, when you turn off your browser's headers and footers, you can easily use straight HTML or any of the online word processors for document editing and get nice PDF's for sharing by email, etc.
Given how I can quite easily write simple documents in raw HTML faster and make them look more consistent (with standardized CSS) than I can do the same in MS Word or OpenOffice, this is pretty useful.
Overall, pretty slick and handy. If you haven't ever tried setting your computer up this way, I highly recommend giving it a shot.
