You’re not lying. You are printing it as a PDF. Your electronic buddy doesn’t see a difference.
Beyond that, also, what’s so hard about clicking on “File > Export As… > PDF” which is literally in the file menu on LibreOffice at the very least. I don’t know about MS Office, but I would assume it’s the same.
oop probably meant from websites
It can produce different results than print to pdf unfortunately
Could you expand on that, I’m curious because export to PDF has always worked flawlessly for me.
I was helping someone and both export and print to pdf messed up different minute aspects of the design/layout. I don’t remember what exactly it was tho
Print to pdf generally loses the text and just makes it an image though. Which can balloon size and prevent ctrl+f without running ocr on it and saving an additional layer with more mistakes than the original.
Are you sure you don’t have “print as image” enabled there? It should keep it as a layered PDF, not rasterizing.
I probably did. Think I’ve had some things not print correctly without that on an actual printer so I turned that on sometimes?
I deliberately use the print as image feature if I don’t want someone to be able to select text or search the document (like if I’m sending something with sensitive info as an attachment to an email). Most of the time, I have that option disabled so the document can be searchable and text can be copied from it.

fwiw its trivial to OCR it. single click in many pdf software.

but I guess it slows down some people

Right…the idea isn’t to make it foolproof, it’s just to make a barrier. People generally go for easier targets over ones with a small barrier. If you have two bikes next to each other in public, one with a bike lock and one with no lock at all, the casual thief is way more likely to steal the one without a lock. Bike locks can easily be broken, but they serve as a deterrent.
Gmail reads the images with OCR and adds it to search terms. Your steps are a noble effort to increase reverse engineering effort, however there are image to text desktop apps now so that effort on the receivers side is almost nothing these days.

I’m going to assume you’re on the younger side. That’s a relatively recent thing. For many many years we had to install PDF printers.

Also the PDF printer is generic, but the export has to implemented for each application individually.

I’m in my forties. The post we are talking about was made in February 2026. Priyanka Lakhara definitely looks younger than me, didn’t even make her Twitter account until January 2024.

What does age or how it worked in the past have to do with a post made… four days ago by someone who is either late twenties to mid-thirties at most?

Also, in those old timey wimey years I was just pirating Adobe Acrobat.

The age comment is not about the age of the posts, but about how you seem so surprised about printing as PDF rather than export as PDF.

Using a virtual printer was the norm until relatively recently, and even then it’s still the most effective because anything than can print can use that to generate a PDF.

That’s how I still create PDFs honestly.

Didn’t want you offend, sorry if came out wrong

No offense taken, just confused because I never had this many problems with PDFs, but as I said, I was pirating Adobe Acrobat for a long, long time so maybe I just didn’t run into as many issues.

CutePDF was the best.

cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp

Started out with it in XP.

CutePDF :: Product :: CutePDF Writer

Still using it today whenever I need to flatten a PDF with my scanned signature.
Why do you need to flatten it?
So that the recipient can’t tell it was an image I pasted onto the pdf instead of a page I printed, signed, then scanned in again.

Just reading that name made my articulations ache.

It’s great is still active though.

Well, but we’re not just talking about Office. What about browsers, document viewers, etc.
My browser saves PDFs fine?
How about notepad. Or paint.