From the Bonehead File: Pragmatic Programmers Books And "Save As PDF"

I (heart) my MacBook Pro.

One of the main reasons I (heart) my MacBook Pro is Mac OS X's built-in "Print... | PDF | Save as PDF..." feature. I've been reading a lot of papers from various online sources recently for my schoolwork, and I love being able to "print" them to a file on my local filesystem for offline reading. HTML, postscript, whatever format you care to publish your paper in, if I can browse it, I can PDF it.

Unfortunately, though, I've gotten so much in the habit of printing to PDF that I've unwittingly given away some of the functionality of some of my documents.

You see, I buy a lot of PDF versions of books from the excellent Pragmatic Programmers catalog. Their PDFs are, without serious exception, among the most informative resources I have at my disposal. But because my browser renders them, and because I'm so used to "printing" my PDFs, I've gotten into the habit of browsing to them and saving them as PDF from the browser. Which, of course, totally wrecks the internal (and external) hyperlinks they have built into the books.

D'oh!

The good news is, the Prags allow one to regenerate purchased PDFs at will (Note: sorry for the spike in regeneration requests this morning, guys! Give the gerbils an extra pellet or two for me.), so I'm back in business, pragmatic-hyperlink-wise.