Paperless printer

From Paperless Office

Slightly less of an oxymoron than paperless paper, paperless printers are software printers that render their output to a file instead of to physical paper. Unless the output is plain text, this means that the documents content and styling can be perfectly captured without committing it to paper. With plain text, the content is captured, but not the style information.

PDF is probably the most common format for paperless printing. PDFs capture the style of the document along with the text. Other formats include .png .tiff and .gif files. These formats capture the graphical representation of the text, but lose the ability to select and search the document's text.

Most operating systems and many desktop publishing applications include some type of paperless printer built in. OS X has a "save to PDF" button each printer dialog box and Open Office has a "save to PDF" function under the file menu.