How to create PDF archives of web pages for research

12 Jul in pdfcreator

If you are like me, you might like to save PDFs of web pages as archives for later research. Here are two tips that might assist with that for Windows machines:

  1. PDF Creator. I have Adobe Acrobat Professional on my machine, but it's so slow generating PDFs from the browser (no, it's not machine; happens with every machine I've had). The open source application PDFCreator is much faster.  Plus, the first dialogue it brings up is a title for the document based on the title field of the web page. I either use that or modify it, and then PDFCreator uses that title as the default for generating the file name. Very rarely, PDFCreator will not be able to generate a good PDF of a web page and then I have to go back to pokey ole' Adobe Acrobat Professional.
  2. Readability is a bookmarklet that produces a more reader-friendly version of any web page. Just add it as a button to your Firefox menu bar. It strips out the header, sidebar, footer, etc. and just shows the main text. Then I just use PDFCreator to print. Note: sometimes it is too agressive and does not display the comments for a blog post (that could be a good thing in certain circumstances).

I've attached a PDF version of this blog post created with PDFCreator and Readblity as an example.

Comments

Thanks

Thanks, Charlie! This does indeed look quite useful.

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