Anything to PDF on iOS

Very simple trick today, which you may actually find useful. I learned it a good while ago and admittedly have been using quite often. The default means of sharing things on a phone is taking a screenshot and reposting it. This is ugly as carries a lot of overhead and makes it (more) difficult to extract the actual information such as copy a portion of text. But is easy (press two buttons) and preserves the view / formatting. Selecting text on the other hand is still the most ugly part of touch screen UX. Wonder if we will have it ever solved.

Anyway, back to the main thread. Sometimes someone asks you to send a well formatted document resulting from a web page (such as ecommerce order) or an email confirmation. Yes you can screenshot. But if the source document is longer than the screen, things become tricky. There are a number of screenshot applications (especially on Android) supporting long screenshots (a single screenshot consisting of multiple pages), but we are talking about plain iOS here.

Use the Print function.

Almost every app supports printing. When you print - iOS opens the printer selection / options window with preview thumbnails at the bottom.

Pinch out the thumbnail.

This magically transforms the thumbnails into a full screen, full resolution PDF preview.

Share it.

Use the "share" button again. This will now share the PDF document. Everyday convenience, but there will be times when this may be a life saver.