Monday, October 3, 2016

Save to PDF for Airprint / iPad Pro

I recently purchased an iPad Pro 9.7 which I love (thanks to a supporter for the gift!).

However, one use I really wanted was to be able to save/print web pages to PDF so that I could read and highlight them at my leisure. I found that Notability is the perfect tool for annotating PDFs, but I couldn't find any way to print a webpage as PDF and import it into Notability.

What I would have expected was that I could navigate to an article I wanted to save to Notability as a PDF and then choose "Print" from the browser and choose "Save as PDF" like I can with a Macbook. However, on my iPad Pro, when I go to select printers, it just says "No Airprint Printers Found".

After quite a bit of research, I found this wonderful little workaround that I just have to share:

First, navigate to a webpage / article that you want to save as PDF to Notability (or whatever your favorite PDF annotation app might be). Then choose the little "share" icon at the top of the screen.


Second, from the menu that appears, choose "Print":


Next, you'll get a print dialog that doesn't have any options you want. But there is a gesture you can use to open the document as a PDF that you can save! 


Note that if you choose "Select Printer" there is no way to save as PDF. But, over the red boxed area above, just use a two finger open pinch and it will expand into a save-able document!

After the two finger open pinch, you will see an expanded version of your print preview that you can now click the "share" icon again at the top right and see the options you really wanted in the first place. :) 


I hope this helps you! I couldn't find this information anywhere but found it hinted at in a couple of places. It is intuitive once you know how to do it and adds a tremendous amount of value to one of the primary use cases for me on my iPad Pro.

Enjoy!