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Archive your receipts and account info with PDFs

Submitted by Merlin on September 2, 2004 - 1:01pm.

Mac OSX bases much of its interface on Adobe’s PDF format and opportunities to use and make PDF files are ubiquitous.

My favorite PDF trick helps me create an archived digital receipt every time I make a purchase online.

  1. Create a folder in “~/Documents/” called “Receipts”
  2. When you reach a page that presents a receipt, account information, or other stuff you want to capture for future reference, Select “File > Print…”
  3. Click the “Save as PDF…” button
  4. In the dialog box, surf to the “Receipts” folder you made earlier
  5. Name the file something meaningful to you
  6. Click “Save”

You now have a single location for all your receipts and account info . If you’re really cool, you might want to create sub-directories for each type of item (“Receipts,” “Accounts,” “MySQL Setups,” “Affiliate Reports,” etc.

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Maybe this is a stupid...

Submitted by Len (not verified) on September 21, 2004 - 8:00pm.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but why don’t you just save the web page as html like the rest of us? It’s smaller, more portable, and you can search folders of html files with the text search built into your OS, whatever you happen to use.

As Wendell aludes, your browser will probably create an html file for the page and a directory of the same name for any associated images/javascript/CSS, but you can always delete that without loss of information if it bothers you.