This is an important question. I wish you had started a new thread for it.

I don't know of a solution that I am 100% happy with. I either save as PDF (not print to PDF, but save as PDF!) or I use the cloud.

1. Printing to pdf often cuts off graphics and they are only partially contained in the file.

Useful tricks:

• Adjust the margins and make them smaller.
• Normal size graphics are not cut off. I assume you increased their size. One trick I occasionally use is ImageSize -> Full, which makes the graphics as wide as the notebook. This makes them as big as possible without cutting anything off. Drawback: 1) doesn't play well with legends 2) if you like to make your notebooks full-screen, the graphics will be too large when viewed on-screen.

I find that in order to make this work well, I need to plan in advance. I write the notebook knowing that I'll need to convert it to PDF, and I pat attention to graphics sizes.

1. The cloud is not the answer when one wants to share Mathematica notebooks within a company and protect proprietary information.

You can protect the notebook with a password. This is what I usually do.

To understand the problematic of the players, I think that it is important to know that on the corporate world, having a piece of software approved for installation can take many weeks (and sometimes even months), eventually being denied at the end.

For reasons that I think are obvious, in this same environment, making the notebook available through cloud service is also a no go, as content is typically IP sensible, and the public cloud is not an approved sharing point (I mean, if the CDF player is not listed on the company tools, why would the public cloud be...).

So, either Wolfram technologies are well integrated on the working environment of a given company, and all these tools are pre-approved, or even eventually already installed (a very small chance... as I myself, for instance, have never encountered such a case....), or there’s a great chance that the pdf will be the only option for sharing.