Using a notebook on the go usually means that you are not in the vicinity of a printer all the time. What happens then when you want to print. Well with Mac OS X you can print to PDF. This is fantastic because you can then batch print those PDFs when you get back to your printer.
The only drawback I have come across with this is that there is no quick key press to print to PDF. ⌘P of course will bring up the print dialogue but then you have to mouse down and click the PDF button and the select “Save as PDF…” which gives you a save dialogue box to name your PDF in.
My problem, I’m a keyboard speed freak. If I’m using the mouse then I like to just use the mouse. If I’m using the keyboard I don’t want to have to switch back to the mouse the back to the keyboard. Precious seconds are lost.
I was thinking about writing an Apple Script solution but I figured there had to be a better way, so with a bit of exploration I discovered a likely candidate in System Preferences.
The keyboard preference pane has a section on Keyboard Shortcuts. Within that is an option to create Application specific shortcuts. With Application Shortcuts selected click the + icon to add a shortcut. You can now select the application that you want the shortcut to relate to. In my case print is the same across applications and I want it to work across applications so i left the default of “All Applications” selected.
The “Menu Title” part is very important. You need to enter the exact text of the dialogue in the menu. In my case it was “Save as PDF…”. Note the ellipses after the PDF. They are part of the menu dialogue and if you don’t type them then it will not work.
The last part is to assign a keyboard shortcut. In my case I made it the same as print ie. ⌘P (This will not conflict with the keyboard shortcut for Print as it is in a level after that shortcut). The double ⌘P press also makes it super fast to print that document to PDF.
I would recommend playing around in the Keyboard Shortcuts section of System Preferences and see what gems you can find to enhance your workflow.