Victor send me an email some days ago asking if I knew of a way to convert a full website into PDF format. I knew that there were several ways to convert a single page to pdf but I was not so sure about complete websites. I started to perform all kinds of searches but never came up with a free software that would convert a full website to PDF. That is, until I stumbled upon the most obvious choice of them all: The trial version of Adobe Acrobat.
Adobe Acrobat can be used as a trial version for 30 days and it actually does have the exact functionality that Victor is looking for. You can download it directly from Adobe with some nagging done by them. Before you can download the file you need to register an account and request the download link which will be send to your email account. My advise to Adobe is that if they want to lower their sales further they should make it even more complicated for users to download the trial versions.
Download and installation take a while since the download has a size of more than 250 Megabyte. Once installed though everything could not be more fluent. Press the keyboard shortcut SHIFT CTRL O or click on the Create PDF > From Web Page button. A menu opens that is asking for a url and offering several options on how to proceed from here.
You can specify the levels from the originating page or that you want to convert the whole website. It is normally a good idea to stay on the server and even on the path. If you do not do this the PDF could really download a lot of unrelated pages from other websites or areas of the same website. You will see the transfers in a box and the final version of the document will be shown at the end.
Works perfectly. The result can then be saved in the end as a pdf document.
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great,
thank you very much.
cool feature, I’ll have to give it a try
How to convert single page into pdf? Webpage from hard drive…please help :0)
use cutepdf
iamdrin check this site:
http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/default.aspx
That only converts a page, not a whole site.
where is the link
Using Firefox and the “Scrapbook” add-on I captured a website of 450+ pages–over 17 MB in size–but all links intact, all graphics, etc. Using Acrobat’s create pdf from webpage as Martin described, the final file was just over 2 MB–and worked perfectly. Bravo Martin!!
how can i convert it to pdf
Do you know of any open source products that will convert websites to PDFs or is Acrobat my only option?
great tutorial!!!But hey you can use primopdf too i think
It LOOKS like it’s going to work then I get a message…
‘Nothing Done’
Authorization failure and the url
Is there a way to get around this?
Thanks
Acrobat did convert my website to pdf.
However, I have a page with tree nodes that calls a .js page for expansion functions. After conversion, the pdf document was not able to open the tree nodes.
Any help on how I could get the tree nodes to expand, contract in the Pdf document would be a big help.
Cocoa tutorial
thank you but where is the Link
Very nice indeed! Very useful.
Does anybody know if the links are preserved in the conversion?
thanks
Try pdfmyurl, it’s free and you don’t need to download or install anything.
http://pdfmyurl.com
Yah, but it only converts a single page, not a full web site (which is the subject of this article).
Hi,
I am getting “Authorization Failure” error message when I give the Windows Authenticated SharePoint portal URL. Could you please let me know how to fix this?
Regards,
Prakash
Now that over a year has past, do we know if there are any good WordPress plugins that will convert a series of posts into a single PDF? I tried poking around myself but still see that the default is to convert a single page or post. Any updates would be appreciated.
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Thanks, I did it with Adobe Acrobat. Yesterday I wasted my 5 hours to do this task and now the software did it for me in 15 minutes..
oh oh oh.. I’ve got a problem with Adobe Acrobat. The sequence is not proper of the pages. Example-
link1->link-2-[data]
link1->link-3-[data]
then again
link1->link-2-[data]…
I think all the data under link1 must come continuously.. which is not in my case… I can’t make proper page numbers because of this problem…
Any one faced the same problem???
yes i am facing the problem given bellow:
1) web page convert to pdf option is not converting hindi or devnagri script font web page how to do it ?
Adobe Acrobat can be a great tool for archiving websites to PDF when it works, but but its severely limited by crashes for bigger use use due to out of memory errors. The out of memory error or IO errors that come up mean the program terminates and the pdf capture you see on the screen can never be saved or recovered, even if you preserve the temp file.
I do legal research, and often I need to capture a blog (eg. on blogger) so I have a permanent record of what was written and what the links link to (since blogs can change and content can be deleted). If I try to do a 2-level capture, its usually ok, but it does not get enough data – it will link out to level and that is it. Usually you need at least 3 (link out to another page, and the subsequent content/document hosted there). However when I do a 3-level capture of an entire blog site, after about 8000 pdf pages, I get out of memory errors in XP or Win7 on machines with 1 to 4 gigs of ram and 40 – 500 gigs of free hard disk space.
I thought it was just me but I tried in on 4 different machines and read the forums and this is a common unresolved problem. It has something to do with the size of the temporary folder, and/or the file size limitations of Acrobat and Windows. It seems that Acrobat creates a single temp pdf file in a directory of the downloaded site and either that file gets too big for it to handle or when you try to save the file it gets too big for the temp folder, regardless of how much disk space you have – emptying the temp folder does not help. There is no resolution to this issue yet – I had this problem with Acrobat 7 and 8, and it still exists in the Acrobat X trial I used last week. Adobe should try to re-engineer the save mechanism so that its caps limits the temp file size and then processes it into a saved PDF before continuing, or allows you to set a page limit, or enables you to continue a capture from a certain page/file count.
Bottom line, its a great tool if you use it mildly and limit the depth/size of your searches. If you don’t, you will waste hours of time and bandwidth since the resulting file will just crash the program and be irrecoverable, so caution. Peace-out from Ottawa.
Thanks for this tip. I just converted a whole html e-book (over 300 pages with illustrations) and it worked beautifully!