Any Mac equivalent to Fine Print

Howdy.

For PDFs to do what you want, consider Cocoa Booklet.

Or look at this, just released today: Printing Manager.

I was just reading your question and idly thought I'd open up a couple of PDFs in Preview to see what could be done with them, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that points 3 through 5 can indeed be accomplished within the Preview app.

• Selecting a page (or multiple pages) in the sidebar and pressing Cmd-Delete deletes the selected page(s), just like deleting files in the Finder. (Edit: Using the Shift or Command keys while selecting does let you select a range of pages or individual, non-sequential pages, respectively. Just had to check, heh.)
• Pages can be dragged around within a document to reorder them.
• Pages can even be dragged between documents, which copies (not moves) them from the source document to wherever you drop them in the destination one.

I realize this probably still doesn't achieve the level of ease FinePrint provides (though I haven't used FP myself), but it seems like it may at least be a workable solution until something more advanced is found. I'm on a PowerBook G4 at the moment, so unfortunately I wasn't able to find out if OS X's PDF printing is/can be exposed as a printing device in a virtualization of Windows. Best of luck, good sir!

Treilanin said:

• Allows you to combine print jobs (ie. Print out from Excel and Word can be combined into a single print job before it is sent to the printer

Click to expand...

Use PDFMergeThing or an equivalent, then print the resulting PDF. I don't merge PDFs much, but when I do, usually only 1 of the 2 programs I have on my computer (don't recall the name of the other) will work the way I want it to.

I need a Mac FinePrint too

I need a Mac FinePrint too, for exactly the same reasons. I frequently print 2up front&back and w/o that it means I'll have to keep my Windows around for printing.

Preview can do it

It´s a little bit tricky to do it, but preview can make the same funcions as Fineprint.

I am also a heavy fine print user in windows and I also looked for this program in the mac world with no results.

Turns out, preview can do the job but it´s a little complicated.

Example: merge 2 or more documents from different sources in one page:

1. Open the first document, press cmd P to bring the print dialog.
2. Make the adjustments and instead of press print, use: preview.
3. You will see the print ready document in preview. Press cmd+shift+D to open thumbnail column.
4. Open the second document and press cmd P also.
5. Make adjustments, and also instead of printing press preview. A second preview window will open with the second job.
6. Press cmd+shift+D to open the thumbnail column and drag the second document thumbnail over the first one document thumbnail (you will see a + sign) and add it.
7. If you need to add more documents repeat steps 4 to 6 as many times as you need. Also, if you have print ready pdfs or other things drag them over the thumbnail column in the first document.

The key here is drag the SECOND and other documents OVER the first so the first one appears like a book. If you need to add more documents, you will see that you can add them inside the first "book" (a frame surrounding the first and second pages will appear, drag and drop inside it). If you don´t do this the pages will not print or process together.

8. Arrange the pages in the order you want dragging the page thumbnails up and down.
9. Press Cmd P again, the print dialog appears, here you can select if you want 1,2,4 or 8 pages per sheet. Make adjustments as necessary.
10. Save as PDF, or print if you need.

A fine companion to fine print is PDF factory, which enable you to export the documents to pdf. A Mac alternative is: Pdfwriter Mac, with it, you can just select the pdf writer printer and press Print and it will generate a pdf document simple and lean.

Hope it helps.

I will do the necromancer on this topic

Amazing that this has spanned through years and that still there is no similar solution for this need on the Mac side.

I switched to Mac on 2009 and still use Windows at work. One of the things that I miss more from the Windows world is precisely Fineprint. I use it at the office all the time.

It is true that some of the functions can be partially covered by printing to PDF and then after using Preview, but the whole range of things the latest versions of Fineprint can do are just so extensive and useful that the Preview replacement looks just archaic in comparison. For example with Fineprint you can remove any image you want directly from the preview interface, move images, paragraphs or other parts of the documents easily between pages or documents in the queue and place them wherever you want, and that are just some of the basic things I am naming here.

It is really a pity that still some excellent Windows products are impossible to find on the Mac world. OSX is an amazing platform and I have learned to be almost as productive on it as I am in Windows, but the difference in software is still big, especially on the technical side.

Ok, I need to revive this thread, too. Isn't there anything similar to Fineprint or priPrinter for Mac?

November 2022 and still looking for a good fineprint alternative for mac.
In the App Store, i found "Create Booklet 2" that might be able to do some of the things fineprint can but I have not tried it yet.

MikeSchinkel said:

I need a Mac FinePrint too

I need a Mac FinePrint too, for exactly the same reasons. I frequently print 2up front&back and w/o that it means I'll have to keep my Windows around for printing.

Click to expand...

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've printed 2-up double-sided many times straight from the standard Mac print dialog like this below, using the options in the Layout section. Picking "short-edge binding" is key if you don't want things to print upside down.



edit: oops, just realized this is a 14 year-old thread.

ignatius345 said:

edit: oops, just realized this is a 14 year-old thread.

Click to expand...

And there's still not a product that can do what Fineprint does on macOS after one and a half decades 😊