Turn a web page into PDF

I just found this and thought i'd share.

How to export a web page into PDF

It's a bit sneaky, but i say the fault is with Adobe for making their service too obviously hackable!

If it helps anyone, i made a bookmarklet. Just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar and it'll be ready to click anytime you want to make a PDF.

Make PDF

I am making no guarantees as to how long this will work. If i worked for Adobe i'd like to make this feature a little bit more secure, heh!

Posted: May 7th, 2008
Categories: useful
Comments: View Comments.
  • Hi, Yes it is a cool thing to have. I will try it today.
  • PDF ebooks are good for Macs too, expecially when an ebook is an .exe which Macs cannot open.

    Had no problem dragging this into my Firefox toolbar but it says "Limited resources on the server blah blah. Please try again later."

    Anyway I look forward to more good tips from your blog, and will explore more! Keep it up! :)
  • Never know you can do this,thanks..
  • jacqui
    thanks!!!!
  • I would think WordPress would probably be a good option. It's reasonably easy to install, and you can put pages up as well as a blog. I think there is post-by-email capability too.

    If you have more questions, come back and ask again.
  • Mega
    I have had to be self taught in my computer skills, hampered by being half blind and half deaf, but doing ok just the same...
    but what I do want is to be able to write to my webpage via email -like I can do on my blogs, rather than have to go to nvu and then to upload via file zilla. using a free software if possible.. I am poor as well.....(especially after the sharemarket collapse)
    I admit I havent figured out some of the settings or even how to on eblogger.com and maybe I can do it from there. (like import and expot?) What I'd like is a newbie plain english instruction on how to .. even if it means putting a blog on the webpage from eblogger.com ? Can you help please??
  • Oh right, thanks for the clarification. I saw your link to the Adobe service and just assumed the sneaky link was a shortcut to the same site.
  • I forgot to add, cool bookmarklet though!
  • hi! thanks for featuring one of my articles in your blog. I have to make things clear.

    1. The method I featured for saving sites as PDFs is NOT from Adobe's online service.
    2. It uses the PDF service from pdfonline.com where, if you go by their "official" steps will have you looking at tons of ads, and clicking through some links instead of going directly to saving your PDF.

    Regardless, it is a cool thing to have. I use that shortcut to just save that interesting article for later reading. But then sometimes, that PDF version never really end up in my trash bin :).

    Thanks again and best regards.
  • Does there need to be a reason? Can't you just be happy that if you wanted to, you could?

    Obviously there is a call for it, because Adobe charge for this service. I just found it cool that there was a back-door, and i enjoyed the challenge of making a bookmarklet, and i decided to share it. I also found it quite interesting, academically, to try it out on a few sites and see what works and what doesn't.
  • Nat
    But why would you want to change a web page into a PDF though? If it's for printing out then good design for print is not the same as good design for web (that's why we have media="print" stylesheets), if it's for electronic distribution then a web page is more accessible and more up to date.

    I suppose it might make sense for making on offline archive of the state of a page at a certain time, but most good browsers will do a 'Save entire page' function that will do that and keep it as accessible HTML.

    If you wanted to create nice PDF files for downloading/printing material already available on the web (material should never be only in PDF form that's terrible accessibility and usability) then it'd make more sense to use OpenOffice's free and legitimate 'Save as PDF' feature.

    Just curious?
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