The print button is a PDF editor

People meet the print dialogue as the thing that appears before paper comes out. It is also, on every computer made this decade, a small free document tool that no one ever introduced you to.

Change the destination from your printer to the option that saves a PDF, and the same dialogue will keep a page, strip its clutter, or pull three pages out of a forty-page document.

Four things it does, in rough order of how often you will want them.

Keep the thing before it disappears

Booking confirmations, order pages, appointment details, the page with the reference number on it. Print it to a PDF and you have the whole thing, permanently, in a file — rather than an email that will be somewhere in a pile in two years, on a website that will have been redesigned by then.

This is the version worth building a habit around. It costs four seconds, at a moment when you are already looking at the page.

Strip an article down to the article

A surprising number of sites still carry a “print” or “printable version” link, and it does exactly what you would want a reader mode to do: no advertisements, no sidebar, no floating video, no thing that slides up from the bottom asking for your email. Opening the print preview does much the same on sites that have no such link.

There is a related use worth mentioning with a caveat attached. Some pages stop you scrolling and put an overlay across the text; the print preview will sometimes show what is underneath. That works because the overlay is a layer rather than a lock. Where a site is asking you to pay for what you are reading, that is not a workaround this page is recommending — somebody wrote the thing.

Take pages out of a document

This is the one people install software for.

Open the PDF in a browser, open the print dialogue, set a page range, and save the result as a PDF. You have extracted those pages. On a Mac, the viewer that is already on the machine will merge, split, rotate and reorder pages from its thumbnail sidebar, which is better than anything you would download.

None of that needs an account, a subscription, or a website.

The part to be careful about

Which brings up the thing the people who do this professionally were firmest about, and it is worth putting plainly.

When you use an online converter — the free sites that merge, split or convert a PDF in your browser — you are uploading the document to somebody else’s computer. For a train timetable, fine. For an employment contract, a medical letter, a tenancy agreement, anything covered by a confidentiality agreement at work, or anything with your bank details in it, that is a decision rather than a convenience, and several people described it as the thing they see colleagues do without noticing they have done it.

The methods above all run on your own machine. That is most of why they are worth learning.

One related point, since it comes up alongside: the security on a PDF is not much of a security. If a file matters that much, the protection is not sending it, rather than locking it.