How to print PDFs with unique file names on Ubuntu

published Sep 30, 2013 02:25 by admin ( last modified Feb 12, 2017 04:09 )

Let's say you have a bunch of web pages you need to print out as PDFs, to send as receipts to the bookkeeping department. If you use the "Print to file" in the Ubuntu print dialog, you will need to manually change the name for each file.

Instead, install cups-pdf, "sudo apt-get install cups-pdf". It will be a new printer in your printer list and will save the PDFs in the ~/PDF directory, with file names based on the titles of the documents.

Should you have the same title on several documents you can even make all PDF printouts unique by adding a print job number to each. Set this in the /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf file.

Update 2017-02-12: For Ubuntu 16.04 I had to reinstall the cups-pdf.conf file. I took it from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/+source/cups-pdf

This software is designed to produce PDF files in a heterogeneous network by providing a PDF printer on the central fileserver. It is available under the GPL and is packaged for many different distributions or can be built directly out of the source files.