how to turn a website into a printable PDF?

February 12, 2008 3:55 AM

I'm going to print out a website and bind it into a book. For the printers, I need to turn everything into one PDF file. How do I do this?

It's a website that's scaled for computer screen sizes. I need to take the web pages and fit them into A4 widths and cut them up into A4 lengths and still be readable .I also need to add page numbers and a table of contents.

Is there any windows compatible software that can help me? Anyone find a systematic way to cut up webpages into a printable page size?

posted by mirileh to computers & internet (9 comments total)

A trick could be to write a simple print.css for the website, with a fixed page-size in pixels and other behaviours, and to script that every webpage from the collection needs to be printed to pdf.

Depending on the text, this may give you widows & orhans, though.
posted by ijsbrand at 4:07 AM on February 12, 2008

ijsbrand, how would you translate the 8.27'' on 11.69'' size of A4 into a pixel size?
posted by mirileh at 4:17 AM on February 12, 2008

Try PDF Creator (free)
posted by PowerCat at 4:24 AM on February 12, 2008

The print.css I made for my weblog was tricked the other way around. Depending on the browser or the printer of the visitor, the body of the site is printed according to given margins [top, left, right, bottom]. [So there would always be more white on the left than on the right]. So, gathered, the prints lookes alright, if the visitor just set his printer to A4.

Still, I've seen print.css's with a fixed body-size of say 400 by 700 pixels, but a good estimate for that would depend on the font-size as well. I think you need to experiment a couple of minutes with that.

There may be tricks to add page-numbering through css, but it is easier to use the page view of the browser for this.
posted by ijsbrand at 4:41 AM on February 12, 2008

[So there would always be more white on the left than on the right]

Since a real book is printed on both sides of the page, you need to alternate margins L-R, as well as headers and footers (unless they're centered).
posted by rokusan at 5:48 AM on February 12, 2008

I used to use PDFCreator for this; now that the freeware version is hard to find and doesn't seem to be supported anymore, I'm using Bullzip PDF Printer. Feel free to use your own PDF printer, of course. The pages are automatically trimmed to fit the page, and printed webpages are numbered at the bottom, though I don't think there's any easy way to customise this.

If the website doesn't have printable view or there are certain elements you want to remove before printing, you can try Aardvark, an extension for Firefox. It's the simplest way I know of for customising a web page's layout prior to printing.

If you need to add a table of contents, I'm afraid you'll have to do so separately. PDFill has a nice set of PDF splitting and merging tools you can take a look at. There are probably better tools out there, but this is the best I know of to do it for free (of course, it's going to screw up your pagination though).

Ever since deciding to go paperless I've been printing webpages and articles to PDF for archival, and this is what I do (sans TOC). Hope it helps =)
posted by kureshii at 6:30 AM on February 12, 2008

@kureshill

PDFCreateor is open source and still under development.
posted by phil at 6:47 AM on February 12, 2008

In A List Apart a couple of years ago: "Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!" -- using something called Prince that converts XML to PDF. Very trippy looking, I haven't tried it, just had a vague recollection of reading the article.
posted by epersonae at 8:25 AM on February 12, 2008

neat epersonae, that looks promising!
posted by mirileh at 8:55 AM on February 12, 2008