Jeremy Bicha wrote up an unknown Ubuntu feature: “printing” direct to a Google Drive PDF. I rather wanted this, but I don’t run the Gnome desktop, so I thought I might be out of luck. But no! It works fine on my Ubuntu MATE desktop too. A couple of extra tweaks are required, though. This is unfortunately a bit technical, but it should only need setting up once.
You need the Gnome Control Centre and Gnome Online Accounts installed, if you don’t have them already, as well as the Google Cloud Print extension that Jeremy mentions. From a terminal, run sudo apt install gnome-control-center gnome-online-accounts cpdb-backend-gcp.
Next, you need to launch the Control Centre, but it doesn’t like you if you’re not running the Gnome desktop. So, we lie to it. In that terminal, run XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME gnome-control-center online-accounts. This should correctly start the Control Centre, showing the online accounts. Sign in to your Google account using that window. (I only have Files and Printers selected; you don’t need Mail and Calendars and so on to get this printing working.)
Then… it all works. From now on, when you go to print something, the print dialogue will, after a couple of seconds, show a new entry: “Save to Google Drive”. Choose that, and your document will “print” to a PDF stored in Google Drive. Easy peasy. Nice one Jeremy for the write-up. It’d be neat if Ubuntu MATE could integrate this a little more tightly.