Save a print job to PDF or any other format

We get calls on how to save a print job to PDF often enough to know it's not completely intuitive. Let's take a look here at how that is done.

We assume that you have already set up a series of transforms to create PDF data from your print job. The question we are answering here is, how do you send that data to a file with a ".pdf" extension?

(Click on the image to expand to full size)

Select the action "Archive to folder" then click the Modify Action button.

Even though the dialog says "Create Action" we know we're modifying the action because (a) you can't change the action type here and (b) we picked "Modify Action" to get here.

Now  click the Edit button next to the "File format" field. The current value is "dfA{sequence:4}{host}". It doesn't matter what the value is on your action, as we're going to change it.

This is the "File format" dialog. What you are building here is a format for creating file names using job properties and your own text.

We opened the "Choose tag" drop down and scrolled down to "Source file without extension". That is the current selection shown here. You can use the mouse or you can type the letter 's' until you come to the selection you want.

After we select "Source file without extension", highlight the contents of the "Template" field. We are going to replace that with our selection.

Click the Insert button. The template field will now read "{source}". Then add ".pdf". What you are saying here is, use the original file name, and substitute the old extension with "pdf".

Click OK; you're almost done!

Click Save to update the action. The action now has our new filename template. Any jobs you save will use the source file name, which comes from the system that sent the print job. And it will have a ".pdf" extension.