Why is it better than printing to PDF? I just use Print and select Print to PDF as the printer (Firefox on Linux). That actually gives better results because it uses a print style sheet if it is available, whereas this site uses the screen style sheet.
It would be useful if you want to print it exactly as it appears on screen: say as an alternative to taking a screenshot of the site and printing that.
Rare, but I've saved a web page as PDF: the hours of my local library. I keep a printout at my fridge, and the PDF file itself is handy when I'm not online but too lazy/engaged to head to the fridge. I could have saved the page as Web Page Complete, but there's no sense saving the Javascript and Flash junk.
I wonder what software they're using underneath, there's no useful metadata in the produced PDFs.
PrinceXML has some of the best stuff in this space, targeted towards companies having the native versions of their documents be The Web, with the print version produced from that. No bullshit about 'neutral' source formats, no astronaut architecture. They share a CTO with Opera, but I don't think they share any code. -- http://www.princexml.com/overview/
PrinceXML is awesome. The company I used to work for writes large publications primarily for the web, but sometimes needs to print book versions. With Prince I was able to use an off the shelf CMS and write CSS3 Print stylesheets that could make some very professional looking PDFs. With this I was able to replace an error-prone and tedious workflow involving Word, XSLT, and InDesign.
I know that might sound like an ad, but it's a really great app and I don't mind going out on a limb to say it. Its implementation of CSS3 (even the non-print parts) has yet to be matched (although browsers might be finally catching up...). Their service is top-notch. I've posted a number of questions, bugs, and feature requests on their forum and they've always been answered directly by the CEO.
These were both produced from the same source HTML (and a lot of clever scripts).
I have nothing but good things to say about this product. It produced a nice looking result. I found its support for print specific CSS extensions made it painless to do page numbering and handle odd/even page styles differently.
This should let you print to a PDF exactly as you would print to a real printer. The only difference is that you end up with a PDF file instead of a physical printed copy. As far as CSS goes, I think that it prints websites using the style sheets that are defined for printing, just as you would expect from a real printer.
Yeah, but using the printer-specific style sheets is exactly what I do not want. Which is why I find this tool useful. If I wanted to print the printer-specific style sheets, I'd use Adobe's PDF printer driver, which I already own.
This could be one way to do it, change the css to media="print" and do a print... you can change it on a page with firebug and see the difference it makes on print...
That's what Print Preview should be for; I'm not sure how Firefox and other browsers handle this on other platforms, but OS X builds the Preview right into the Print dialog, so I don't see the Print Preview option. That would be the easiest way to view how a page looks when printed.
Even on print preview, if the css sheet does not include print (like media="screen") it will not be pulled in, at least in firefox (on linux that I can test). If you open firebug and set the css sheets to media="all" it will pull the css into the print preview and look (more) correct
The result was amazingly bad on one trial HTML page; font (Verdana) was mostly far too small. This is a smart page that checks the display size and re-sets em measurements for DIV's and text to account for the increasing density of displays, so it's not entirely typical, but not weird either. But the resulting PDF is useless, whereas printing to PDF in the usual way works perfectly.
http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/ is a really good library if you're looking for an out-of-the-box library. Pandoc is also worth a look if you know Haskell or don't mind command line calls.
I guess it's nice to have it as a web service, but: print to file, save as postscript, run ps2pdf and you're done. Let the browser render it and you'll be assured it's correct.
It should be really easy to add an option to firefox to do print to postscript right from the command line.
This service seems to be totally accessible using GET, so it would be easy to embed this in a Firefox extension or better yet, just create a bookmark that uses the %s replacement feature.
Tried to convert http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes but the output doesn't show beyond the page 1. I use evince document viewer comes with Ubuntu. Dunno what's wrong. Though we won't use it(converter) frequently it's good to have a neat converter around :D.
One old trick of mine on Windows is to install an Apple Laserwriter, 'Print to file', and then output the filename for the .ps to load into Ghostscript.
As a bonus, you can take out textual watermarks in some cases, because of the Postscript being basically text.
scratches head I tried to convert my site (http://www.shiveringkittens.com) and just got back the original form, with no apparent PDF document to download. What'd I miss?
I like this. It is much better than Firefox and Safari. As for usage, I like to save press articles and keep them as downloadable PDFs so that I can quickly show someone on the road that we're a real company. Just one example.
This is great. I've been looking for a way to print to pdf, preserve css styling, and keep text searchable for a while now. A bookmarklet for this service would really put the icing on the cake, though.
I'd like to know about the technology on the back end. Judging by the output, it looks like someone just did a "Print to PDF" on OS X and then ran it through Acrobat Pro for the OCR.
Given that it renders my site completely atrociously for some reason I've not bothered fully investigating, whereas the PDFs generated by Safari on OS X look just fine (just checked), I can pretty well promise that they're doing something else.
the PDF Download firefox extension (mostly made to keep firefox from trying to open Adobe Reader within a tab because a very slow program within a fairly slow program is unbearable) has for awhile had a "save this page as PDF" option accessible from its address bar icon.
Not sure how the quality compares, but it's certainly more convenient. (I've also never, ever used it because who wants HTML documents in a larger, less-portable form?)
