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Any Mac equivalent to Fine Print

T

Treilanin

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 10, 2008
3
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My wife is about to take the plunge into the Mac side of thing and has slowly been going through her standard applications to find Mac alternatives. For the most part I think we have most of the alternatives covered except for FinePrint. FinePrint is a virtual printer driver that allows you exert a lot of control on the way you print all from a very nice interface:

  • Allows you to manage 2up, 4up, 8up and duplex settings
  • Allows you to store and save print jobs
  • Allows you to delete pages from a print job
  • Allows you to reorder the pages of a print job
  • 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

Is there an alternative out there that provides all these abilities from a single GUI application? The most important points form my wife are the last three points.

If there is no application equivalent to FinePrint, from what I understand the default printing capabilities of Leopard really cover the first point. The second point could be achieved by using the built in print to PDF functionality. The third and fourth could be achieved by editting the PDFs, however the final point would require editting multiple PDFs and combining them which would be quite tedious.

Also is there a way to have a Windows XP guest OS running under Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox print to the Mac PDF printing capabilities?

Thanks,

Abe
 
Cocoa Booklet sounds interesting but it really isn't related to what my wife uses FinePrint for. She doesn't use it to print booklets, she mainly uses it manage and manipulate her print jobs. For example she would use it to print out a piece of information from a manufacturer website and then combine that print out with a print out from the store selling the product. She would then use then take the combine print job, eliminate any dead or unnecessary pages and then print it 2up/4up with duplex.

Printing Manager and subsequently Printing Works doesn't provide any of the functionality that is offered by FinePrint. In fact the description seems to indicate that they are entirely two different pieces of software. Printing Manager/Printing Works are accounting packages to manage the use of your printer/printers with Printing Manager being a web front end to Printing Works. That isn't really what FinePrint does.

I do appreciate the feedback though. I am just hoping I don't have to tell her that she needs to do a lot of PDF manipulation to get somewhat the same end result.
 
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!
 
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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.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. I let my wife know and though she really wants the fifth point of functionality she will live if she has to merge pdfs. In addition to all of this I have also looked into running fineprint in a virtual machine like Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox and it looks like it could work as well so that might be an alternative.
 
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.
 
Last edited:
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.

Screen Shot 2022-11-03 at 9.43.44 AM.png


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