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Download PDF Files in Safari on Mac

This guide is about the How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac. I will try my best so that you understand this guide very well. I hope you all like this guide How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac.

Wondering how to download and save PDF files from Safari to Mac? If you frequently encounter and work with PDF documents online, you may be interested in saving them locally to your Mac from time to time. Safari makes it easy to open, save, and download PDFs to your Mac.

The process is fairly simple, as this tutorial shows several different ways to download PDFs to save them to your Mac from Safari.

You may have noticed that the default Safari automatically opens PDFs that are clicked into browser windows. It may confuse some users at first, but it’s ultimately OK because if we want to save a PDF file, which is very easy to do, as you can see.

How to download and save PDF files from Safari to Mac

Opening PDF files in Safari on a Mac allows you to easily download and save them to your computer, the process is as follows:

  1. Open Safari on a Mac if you haven’t already
  2. Navigate to the PDF file in Safari that you want to save to your Mac
  3. With the PDF open in Safari, drag the File menu down and choose Save As
  4. How to save and download a PDF file from Safari to Mac

  5. Name the PDF, select the item to which the PDF will be downloaded, and then click Save to download and save the PDF locally to that item on your Mac.
  6. Save and download a PDF from Safari to your Mac

In this sample image, we download the study PDF document (https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2020-decabo.pdf) and save it locally to the Mac desktop where it is easily found.

To download a linked PDF from Safari to a Mac, it works the same way as downloading any other linked item in Safari on a Mac:

  1. Right-click on the PDF file link and select “Download Linked File As”
  2. Download the linked PDF file from Safari on Mac

  3. Save the PDF to the desired Mac destination

You can use either method to download and save PDFs to your Mac.

Download and save linked PDF files to Safari with the Option key

Another lesser known Safari download trick is hold down the OPTION key, and then click a link to the PDF, or update the current URL if the PDF is already open in Safari.

It also downloads the PDF directly to the Downloads folder, as specified by Safari.

Note that saving a PDF from Safari is completely different from saving a webpage as a PDF in Mac Safari, the latter of which preserves the webpage as a PDF and also saves it locally. It’s a bit unnecessary, but you can technically use the same PDF saving approach to an existing PDF, which can be useful in some situations if the PDF you’re saving is stuck in an iFrame or similar that prevents easy access to open the file, for downloading and saving.

And one more cool trick; if you forget where you got a particular PDF but want to know the source URL, you can use this Safari trick to get the original direct download URL.

How to get Safari to download PDFs instead of opening them

The download tips above allow you to download PDFs from Safari, but you can still end up opening a PDF in Safari as well. If you want to download a PDF instead of opening it, you can try the following tricks:

  • If it’s a link that you can click to access the PDF, you can simply hold down the OPTION / ALT key when you click the URL to download the PDF immediately

Another option to download a PDF file instead of opening it in Safari is this:

  1. Download the PDF to Safari, then click the URL bar
  2. Hold down OPTION / ALT
  3. Click return (or refresh the displayed PDF) to download the PDF

This will immediately download the PDF to the Downloads folder, unless you have changed the download location in Safari.

Keep in mind that Safari uses the User Downloads folder on your Mac by default, but you can change Safari’s download location to your liking, if necessary.

These methods work on virtually all versions of Safari, basically all versions of MacOS and Mac OS X, so no matter what software version you’re using, you can open, download, and save PDF files locally to your Mac if needed.

Do you know any other tips or advice on opening, downloading, and saving PDFs from Safari on your Mac? Share with us in the comments!

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FAQ: How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac

In this guide, I told you about the How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac.

In this guide, I discuss about the How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac, which is very helpful.

Apple Devices only.

mac OS or iOS

Final note: How to Download PDF Files from Safari on Mac

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James Hogan
James Hogan
James Hogan is a senior staff writer at Bollyinside, where he has been covering various topics, including laptops, gaming gear, keyboards, storage, and more. During that period, they evaluated hundreds of laptops and thousands of accessories and built a collection of entirely too many mechanical keyboards for their own use.
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