Mac users

[amalthia]

Hi, are there any Mac users here that are willing to share any tips and tricks for creating PDFs or RTF documents on a Mac computer?

I'd really appreciate any and all help or online guide links?

Comments

[aranel-took.livejournal.com]

I do all my writing in Scrivener and StoryMill, so I need to export to a word processor to share my stories. I use TextEdit (the Mac's basic text editor included with OS X). I just copy/paste my text into it and Save As RTF. I can also use it to export to HTML without any inline CSS. If you want "clean" HTML from the RTF, go into Preferences and under "Open and Save", change "Styling" to 'No CSS'. I also use UTF-8 and HTML 4.01 Strict as settings and it seems to work out pretty well. In turn, I can use that HTML in Calibre to create LRF.

For PDFs, I use Apple's Pages. I open or copy/paste my RTF version into Pages, then add the formatting that PDF can handle (custom fonts and graphics). PDF is a built-in file format to save to. If you're using a pseudonym/screenname, you'll want to "print to PDF" rather than "Export" so you can change the author information. I had trouble with that overriding the Author I had set in the Info field of the document with my real name.

I've never used Word, but I imagine it's going to be similar to Pages in how the PDFs are handled.

Any other questions, just ask! :-)

[amalthia]

You're a lifesaver! :)

I've been trying to think of a work around for this person I know to create RTF's and PDFs. I think she's using Word 2004 in Mac and for some reason all the paragraph spacings are lost when she converts to RTF and not knowing anything about Mac programs I felt out of my depth in helping figure out what's going on.

But I'll look into the programs you mentioned and link her to this post.

I can't thank you enough!

[aranel-took.livejournal.com]

No problem! :-)

If she's using Word and doesn't have Pages, her best bet may be to copy/paste into TextEdit and format the document there. TextEdit will also "print to PDF". I just use Pages for PDF because it has all the document formatting features (header styles and the like).