I’ve moved away from OpenOffice.org’s Writer application and started using Apple’s Pages for word processing. One of the great things with the Mac is that PDF has been tightly integrated from the begining, with (from memory) the display output being based on PDF rendering… but I might be making that up. (No wait, I am right).

So, you’d expect PDF output to work faily well? Kinda.

I used Pages’ “export” option to deliver a crisp PDF document for my viewing pleasure, only to find that each page was actually about 2/3 the size it should be, and in the bottom right corner. It looked like the document had been reduced on a photocopier and printed to the bottom right. Make sense?

I searched for a reason why, assuming my paper size was set wrong but Pages knew I was on A4. Then I found an article that suggested printing to PDF-X. Sure enough, instead of exporting I needed to print to the PDF driver.

And now my PDFs look tastylicious.