When saving a Pages doc to PDF does it save the original or do I need to duplicate it first?

When saving a pages doc to pdf does it save the original or do I need to duplicate it first?



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: saving a pages doc to pdf

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Aug 4, 2025 12:52 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 4, 2025 2:48 PM

Dragons88 wrote:

Thank you for that. If I have a saved doc, does exporting it to PDF delete the original though, so I can go back to edit it?


Printing or exporting a Pages or Keynote or Office document does not delete the original file, and the original content.


I’ve met very few non-trivial documents that were ever correct in the original edit, and needed no revision. Deleting the original (source) document would cause issues for most of us.


PDF documents are a snapshot of the contents of the source document, at the time of printing. Much of what makes a document editable is lost when printing, or when generating the PDF document. PDF documents are optimized for printing, and to a lesser extent for online viewing.


Editing a PDF file is problematic at best. Please don’t assume the PDF is useful for anything other than for viewing or printing, or for limited use with some Adobe-related and less-than-portable PDF-based extensions.

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 4, 2025 2:48 PM in response to Dragons88

Dragons88 wrote:

Thank you for that. If I have a saved doc, does exporting it to PDF delete the original though, so I can go back to edit it?


Printing or exporting a Pages or Keynote or Office document does not delete the original file, and the original content.


I’ve met very few non-trivial documents that were ever correct in the original edit, and needed no revision. Deleting the original (source) document would cause issues for most of us.


PDF documents are a snapshot of the contents of the source document, at the time of printing. Much of what makes a document editable is lost when printing, or when generating the PDF document. PDF documents are optimized for printing, and to a lesser extent for online viewing.


Editing a PDF file is problematic at best. Please don’t assume the PDF is useful for anything other than for viewing or printing, or for limited use with some Adobe-related and less-than-portable PDF-based extensions.

Aug 5, 2025 3:26 AM in response to Dragons88

MrHoffman has thoroughly addressed your question. Additionally…


When you first select a Pages template and see a blank document named "Untitled.pages," the first thing you should do, before entering any content, is manually save it and give it a meaningful document name. That does two things: 1) enables autosave of subsequent changes about every 10 seconds, and 2) begins document versioning.


Restore an earlier document version in Pages on Mac - Apple Support


Because of this versioning feature, I never duplicate a Pages document. That can lead to confusion.


I also have Apple's Time Machine backing up my Mac every hour it is powered on.


Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support



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When saving a Pages doc to PDF does it save the original or do I need to duplicate it first?

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