Saving, printing and closing

⌘S writes the document as a PDF, always. See Getting started. This page is about everything else that puts something on disk: saving as you go, going back to what is on disk, writing the pages out as pictures or as Word, printing, closing, and the record the document keeps of itself.

Saving as you go

File ▸ Save Changes Automatically writes the document a moment after you stop marking it, without your asking.

The setting belongs to the document, not to the application. Two tabs open side by side can have different answers, and the tick shows the answer for the one in front: it is read each time the menu opens rather than written once. A document nobody has answered for saves itself. The answer you give is remembered against the file's own path, so a document that is renamed comes back without it. The setting follows the file in front of you, not a document identity that a copy would inherit.

Some things it will not do, each for a reason:

A document with no file is never written this way. Pictures opened as pages are not a file yet, so there is nothing to write to; ⌘S asks where.
A form still being built is left alone. Leaving the mode is what writes the fields, and a write in the middle of laying them out would put a document on disk with no form in it. See Building a form.
An encrypted document is never written without being asked, because saving takes the password off. See Protection.

Nothing is written beside your file. There is no second document with (Autosaved) in its name; the file itself is the only thing this touches.

Turning it on for a document that already has unsaved work saves it at once, rather than waiting for the next mark.

Going back to what is on disk

File ▸ Revert to Saved throws away everything since the last write and reads the file again. It acts on the tab in front, whichever that is, not on the document the window was opened for. Getting that wrong matters, because a revert discards work rather than merely misplacing it.

With Save Changes Automatically on, the last write was a moment ago, so there is very little to go back to. The two commands answer opposite questions and work poorly together.

Writing the pages out as pictures

There are two commands, and they are not the same one. One writes pictures somewhere; the other writes over the pictures you opened.

File ▸ Save As Pictures… asks for a folder and writes one PNG per page into it, or one per sheet picked in the page sidebar, when any are picked. The panel says which of the two it is about to do. The pictures are named after the document and numbered from one: report-001.png, report-002.png, and a single page takes the stem alone. If any of those names are already in the folder you get one warning listing them, before anything is written, and Return cancels, so pressing a key without reading does no harm. Each page is drawn at the resolution its own pictures have, so a sheet scanned at 300 to the inch comes out at 300, not at screen size. The document you have open is not changed.

File ▸ Save Pictures in Place is the other command. It is for a document made from pictures, and it writes each sheet back over the file it came from, in that file's own format and at the size the sheet now is. Only the sheets picked in the sidebar are written, or, failing that, only the ones that have changed: a picture nobody touched is not rewritten and not re-encoded. If the sheets and the pictures no longer match one for one, because a sheet has been added or removed since, nothing is written at all and the ordinary save takes over.

Save As Pictures… makes new files. Save Pictures in Place replaces the originals. They sit next to each other in the menu and are one word apart.

See Working with pages for the other half of this: cropping a deck before writing it back out.

Save As Word…

File ▸ Save As Word… writes a .docx that looks like this document when it is opened in Word. Every block of text is placed where the PDF had it and every cross-reference becomes a hyperlink. Pictures and formulae come across as flat images. Nothing else survives: no tables, no styles. It is for handing something in and having it commented on, not for typesetting it again.

Only the sheets picked in the sidebar are written when some are picked, and the panel says so. This document is not changed: like every Save As here, it writes a copy and leaves you on the document you had. Afterwards the status line says how many pages, blocks of text and cross-references went into it.

Print…

File ▸ Print… prints the document you are working in, not whichever document the first pane happens to hold, and the sheets picked in the page sidebar if any are picked, the whole document otherwise. The print job is named after that document, so a queue cannot show one document's name over another's pages.

The panel's preview is drawn by this application rather than handed over whole. That is what gives it the controls beside it:

Scale, as a percentage or as a rule: Print Entire Image is the largest size at which the page fits, Fill Entire Paper the smallest at which it covers, with the overflow clipped.
Turning a page 90° when its shape disagrees with the paper's.
Several pages to a sheet, laid out in a grid as close to square as the count allows and filled row by row from the top left.

Orientation, paper size and the preview itself are the system panel's own.

Only what is in the file prints. The dashed box round a selection, the reading bar, and a black-out that has not been made permanent are on the screen and nowhere else. See Blacking out and Making marks permanent. What reaches the paper is what the document says.

Closing

⌘W closes what you are looking at. With a comment editor or a note panel in front that is the panel; otherwise it is the document in front, the way it is in every application that holds several documents in one window. The window goes when its last document does.

File ▸ Close Window (⇧⌘W) closes the window and everything in it at once. Every tab that has unsaved work and does not save itself is asked about in turn: Save, Don't Save, or Cancel, and Cancel keeps the window. A tab that saves itself is not asked about, because the question is already answered.

A window closing is not consent to write. Nothing is saved because a window went away; the asking happens where you can answer it.

Opening something again

File ▸ Open Recent is filled at the moment you open it, from the system's own list of recent documents, so a file opened from the Finder a second ago is there. An empty list shows No Recent Documents rather than being blank, because an empty menu and a broken menu look the same. Clear Menu forgets the list.

File ▸ New in Size names the paper sizes a blank document can be made in: A3, A4, A5, Letter, Legal and Tabloid, and the tick shows the size every new document gets. Choosing one here applies to that document only and is forgotten as soon as it is used: picking A3 once does not quietly make every future document A3. A change of mind belongs in Settings, where it is remembered.

Left alone, the size follows your region: A4 everywhere except the handful of places that use Letter. This is worked out from your region rather than fixed at first launch, so a machine that moves is not stuck with the answer it gave on its first day.

What the document remembers of itself

File ▸ Document ▸ History carries the same commands the list's own menu does: Show the List, Add an Entry, Edit the Note…, Remove the Entry, so the two cannot disagree about what can be done. The list itself is described under History.

File ▸ Document ▸ History ▸ Check the History answers whether each entry still follows the one before it. There are three possible answers, and it gives whichever is true: that the document has no history yet; that entry n does not follow the one before it, meaning something changed the record after it was written; or that the record adds up, saying how many of the entries are linked to the one before them. The count matters: entries written before records were chained carry no link, so a report that the chain holds would be true but useless for a record where only two of forty entries are linked.

This shows that nothing was changed quietly. It does not show who wrote the entry; that would need a signature.

A record that does not add up is also shown in the status line when the document is opened. A record that holds is not shown there, on purpose: a check that always reports success stops getting noticed, and then the day it reports something different, nobody notices. Use this command when you want to check, even if nothing is wrong.

When a save cannot carry everything across

A save tries to keep everything it did not write, but a few things can be lost in a rewrite. Each of them is reported rather than left for you to find later: files attached inside the document, the printed page numbers, a group of form options that may no longer be exclusive, a signature that could not be drawn into the file (it shows here and will be blank in other readers), and the document's layers, whose contents end up simply on the page.

This is reported in the status line. For attachments it also raises a sheet naming the document, because a file carried inside a PDF is the one a reader is most likely to miss.