Comments on: how to turn a website into a printable PDF?

Question: how to turn a website into a printable PDF?

mirileh — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:55:11 -0800

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?

By: ijsbrand

ijsbrand — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:07:21 -0800

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.

By: mirileh

mirileh — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:17:08 -0800

ijsbrand, how would you translate the 8.27'' on 11.69'' size of A4 into a pixel size?

By: PowerCat

PowerCat — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:24:58 -0800

Try PDF Creator (free)

By: ijsbrand

ijsbrand — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:41:05 -0800

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.

By: rokusan

rokusan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:48:31 -0800

[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).

By: kureshii

kureshii — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:30:36 -0800

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 =)

By: phil

phil — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:47:20 -0800

@kureshill

PDFCreateor is open source and still under development.

By: epersonae

epersonae — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:25:43 -0800

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.

By: mirileh

mirileh — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:55:59 -0800

neat epersonae, that looks promising!