Re: [Gramps-users] Save Web Page as PDF

[David R. <dr...@ro...>]

I have also been saving Web pages to PDF to include in my Gramps media 
library.
[Yes I am aware of copyright issues - but I don't intend to publish my 
site on the open Web].

I use MacOS X which offers a 'Print to PDF' option for all applications. 
It works reasonably well, but there have been times when it didn't work 
quite right - I think it was handling a scrolling text box inside an 
page. However the MacOS option merely tries to give you a PDF image of a 
printed page - no active features on the page will work.

The Firefox extension which I use when I can is 'PDF download' as it 
seems to make the best attempt at producing a PDF file that represents 
the original page - for example most clickable links are still clickable 
in the PDF version. (Acrobat Reader will launch your default brower for 
the link's target). However, there are times when a page will not 
convert and you get the 'Server busy' message. I think that this happen 
when you are accessing a site that requires a login and which then 
tracks the dialogue with a cookie. PDF Download in your browser sends a 
request to an external 'pdfdownload' server quoting your URL for the 
page to be converted. The pdfdownload server tries to refetch the page 
using your URL - but it doesn't have your cookie - so the target web 
server demands a fresh login and the whole process stalls. You can 
explore this effect yourself using two different browsers. Find an 
interesting page in, say, Firefox - then copy the URL into, say Safari, 
and see if Safari retrieves the same page. For sites that use session 
tracking cookies, a fresh login will be demanded.

When PDFdownload doesn't work, I find that the 'pdfit' Firefox extension 
works well, so that has been my second choice - it converts in your 
browser, so cookies are not an issue. It can also give a png image 
version of the page.

David Rowe