Great unexpected side effect

I’ve just discovered a particularly handy aspect of Scrivener. I was trying to print off a piece, and got a PDF-type dialogue box.

“Pfft,” I said, and fished down through the options, to find “Open as PDF”.

This turns out to be dead handy. I often have to ask interview subjects questions to clarify stuff in my notes, so usually I do that by emboldening or highlighting the queried parts of the piece I’m writing, and sending them the whole piece.

Since most business people are convinced that they can write (wrong!), this encourages them to rewrite the whole thing.

But now I can send it to them as a PDF, which has a kind of psychological barrier effect - they’re used to a PDF being a finished piece of work, and don’t try to change it. Heh…

Yes, the PDF thing is cool - you can do the same in most Cocoa programs and, indeed, most programs on OS X. If you can print, you should also be able to save as PDF. (Back when I used to use Windows, you either had to have Acrobat or jump through hoops to be able to create a PDF; I couldn’t believe it was so easy on OS X.)

All the best,
Keith