Getting a (complete) web page into PDF

TidBITS Talk
21

Thanks very much for that - it appears to work. The format changes a bit, but everything is there.

David

22

I generally use Safari’s Export to PDF, as has been already mentioned. But other alternatives include Shottr, and Paparazzi. Both are Mac apps.

23

I’d not come across PrintFriendly before, that looks like it will be very useful. Thanks!

24

Hmm. Some safari webpages DO give only one but in my experience, rarely. Reader usually gives me the whole manuscript. Always learning. Thank you for the Print Friendly tip. Best, Patrick

25

I have used Voila in the past for these situations, but not recently, because ‘Export to PDF’ seems to work most times.

26

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27

One great way to send a clean readable web page article is by activating ‘Show Reader’ in Safari then sharing the page via email.

28

Plop: I use that all the time. But, need help as going to FILE then SHARE gives me Messages and a few other things but NOT EMAIL as an option.
Any ideas are appreciated. Best, Patrick

29

Interesting.
I am able to use email, among other selections but when I select More, I get under System Preferences, “Could not load Extensions”, even when I manually select the Extensions item.

Mid 2012 Retina MacBook Pro running 10.15.7
Yeah, I know


30

Strange, I have ‘Email’ as the first choice and can’t even remove that option if wanted. I’m running Mojave in french and the shortcut for it is ⌘I

31

Yes I have tried activating “Show Reader” in the File menu. But, as I have noted, it generally results in a document missing images or often, just shows one page (of a multipage document). Reader used to show up automatically for web sites where it could be used; that stopped a couple of OS updates ago.

David

32

David,
I have made a quick test : copy two paragraphs and pictures in the middle of the text and paste in LibreOffice.
Thé result was rather good.
Of course without the header.

1 Like
33

Print Friendly works fine for me now and I don’t have to install software and cut and paste!

David

34

I’ve had this problem where the email option disappears under the Shared menu from time to time. It’s apparently a known bug/problem. Years ago I found a tip online to run the following command in Terminal and it fixes it. I only have to run once a year or so.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed

35

Don’t know if this would help in this case, but what works for me on Firefox is to copy the part of the complex web page by selecting a point at the top and scrolling down to select what I want, then copy it. This lets you select only one column on the web page, with otherwise would be overprinted by other columns. I paste the resulting document and paste it into Nisus Writer, which has RTF as its native file format, which gives me a reasonable simulation of the web page, with graphics. I just tried with Word 2019 and it works if I save it as a .docx file.

36

This worked, Marc. Thank you so much. Now I can email these Reader Views to my students and friends. This is awesome. Best, Patrick

37

3 posts were split to a new topic: Creating a PDF of emailed TidBITS issues

39

SiteSucker (on the App Store) has an option to “suck” a whole website to PDF. Depending on the size and organization of the site the results may be more or less satisfactory. It has a number of options to tweak the output, whether to follow offsite links, how deep into the hierarchy to go, “pagesize,” max filesize, etc. Your mileage may very depending on your patience at tweaking.