It’s common that customers need to quickly and easily generate a PDF from SAP for a document. Typically, we do this by setting up an output type that has a PDF output defined. But what if this is a last minute request from a user and no output is defined?

An undocumented feature in SAP allows you to generate a PDF directly from an SAP print preview. Here’s how:

You can execute this in any transaction that has print preview. (Note: this works for documents in your spooler as well since the feature is incorporated into the preview app itself.) The only caveat is that this only works for SMARTFORM-based forms up to NetWeaver 701. Newer version support both form types.

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Generate a PDF directly from an SAP

In this example, I’ll bring up VL03n and pull up a delivery note in print preview by selecting Outbound Delivery->Issue Delivery Output from initial screen.

Select the output type you want to use as shown below in Fig. 1 and press the print preview button (4th from the left).

You’ll now be in the print preview app.

In the command window, type “PDF!” and press ENTER.

You’ll now be in the PDF preview and can save the PDF to your desktop. (Of course, you could print the PDF directly from the print preview, but that isn’t new.)

If you are on Netweaver 701 and newer, this feature is now available using a menu option by accessing Go To->PDF Preview from the print preview menu.

Hope this quick tip helps.

Resources

• Transportation (LE-TRA) – Printing Outputs from Document Processing at: https://help.sap.com/viewer/70c00d8f54f845aea4fe7d9a21320afa/6.00.31/en-US/bd95c95360267214e10000000a174cb4.html

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When can this be used:

1) Whenever one triggers a print output in SAP it either gets immediately printed or will be saved as buffer in print spool.

2) It might require that at some point user want to convert this output in to a PDF file .

SAP provides two ways in which a print output can be converted in to a PDF format.

1. Directly from print preview of output. Steps involved for the same is as below.

A.) Goto the print preview of the document which needs to be converted in to pdf format.

B.) Execute the command ‘PDF!’ in the command line as shown below. This will convert print preview of output in to PDF which can be saved.

Converting Spool output into a PDF format

This section can be further divided in to two.

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1. When the spool output contains less than 99 pages.
2. When the spool output contains more than 99 pages.

When spool output contains less than 99 pages:

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When a spool has less than 99 pages we can run a SAP report RSTXPDFT4 in SE38 to convert the output to PDF. We can also have a Z t-code made for the program made for the same .

steps:

a) Execute the program RSTXPDFT4 in SE38 by entering the spool number which is to be converted to PDF.

b) Enter the path for the file to be saved.

c) You will receive success message once file is saved.

When spool output contains more than 99 pages: The above steps are only useful if number of pages is less than 99. When the number of pages in spool is more than 99 in addition to RSTXPDFT4 program we need to run one additional program RSTXPDFT5. Steps are as explained below.

STEP BY STEP DESCRIPTION

Step 1 :- Spool number identified which has more than 99 pages in it.

Step 2:- Run the program RSTXPDFT4 with the Spool number.

Step 3:- There will be message pop up “PDF convertion in Back ground?”. Click on Yes.

Step 4:- On clicking ‘Yes’ a batch job will be created and scheduled.

Step 5:- Go to sm37 and you can see the batch job running. Note down the spool number from the batch job.

Step 6:- Run the Second program( using se38) – RSTXPDFT5 and enter the Second spool number(the one got in background job) in the selection screen and execute.

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Step 7 :- On executing there will be pop up for entering the file name. Name the file and path for saving the file. The file name extension would be .pdf

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PDF File downloaded will be downloaded to the path specified in save as screen