Alternatives to CUPS-PDF

Yeah, Macs can natively generate PDFs, but occasionally that functionality isn’t enough (case in point, printing Judicial Council forms after filling them out in Acrobat, to get rid of the buttons etc). Used to be you could install CUPS-PDF and call it a day. But Apple has locked down the operating system more and more with each new version, and I haven’t been able to get CUPS-PDF to work for years. I have found a couple of new packages that do work, however.

High Sierra and Big Sur

Most of my machines are still on High Sierra. It’s fast, still supported, and supports my ancient hardware (like the “Balcony Mac” I’m typing this on, a Mid-2010 iMac Core i3, upgraded with 12GB RAM and an SSD drive). I’m testing Big Sur, too.

The same fork of PDFwriter (see below) works on both. I used the RWTS-PDFwriter.pkg installer (version 1.0.1), downloaded from https://github.com/rodyager/RWTS-PDFwriter, and everything was setup to work immediately. Printouts are located under /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/$USERNAME/, and the installer puts an alias to /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/ under /Users/Shared. Easy. Just run the .pkg and you’re done.

 PDFwriter (High Sierra)

If you want to use PDFwriter for some reason, it works great, once you tweak things a bit. Apparently this doesn’t work on newer operating systems, but it worked great at least as recently as High Sierra:

• Download (I used version 1.2.1) and run the installer.
• Open Control Panel ➔ Printers & Scanners
• Click the + button in the lower left corner to add a printer
• In the Add window, select PDFwriter from the list, and in the “Use:” drop-down list, select “Other...”
• The PPD file you want is: /Library/Printers/Lisanet/PDFwriter/PDFwriter.ppd
• Now it’s ready for use:

PDFs “printed” via this software will be in /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/$USERNAME/, and the installer puts an alias to /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/ under /Users/Shared. Easy.