Saturday, May 21, 2011

How to Print or Make a PDF from Any Blog or Web Site

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program for this news flash! PrintFriendly.com is a web site that lets you print or make PDFs from any blog or web site.  The process is quick and easy, and can be accomplished in several ways.  When you find something:  a recipe, tutorial, article, that you want to print, open a new tab and put http://www.printfriendly.com/ in the address bar.  When the PrintFriendly page comes up, paste the URL of the page you wish to print or save to PDF in the box indicated.  Second, if you print or save PDFs from a lot of blogs or web sites, put the bookmarklet in your browser.  Click "Instructions" in the box on the lower left of the page, and there will be instructions for the different browsers. Just follow them.  Third, many web sites or blogs now sport a PrintFriendly button, that you can just click to print.  Note:  On blog's, be sure that you are on the post's page, not the blog's main page.

Once the page you want to print comes up on PrintFriendly, you will see the following at the top: Print, PDF, email, text (the default is 12 pt, but you can change it from 9-15 pt) a check box for no images, and an undo icon.  If you do not want any of the images on the page, click the no images check box.  If you want to delete selected images hover the cursor (hand) over the image and click to delete that image.  Hover the cursor (hand) over any text and it will turn yellow and a "Click to Delete" message comes up.  Click to delete the text that you do not want.  If there are links in the text, you may have to delete the text in sections.   I have found that italics sometimes does not delete.  When you have the document the way you want it, you can chose to print it, make a PDF to print or save or email it.  I generally use PDF and save it to my computer.  There will be information at the top of the PDF or printed page on where the document came from.

When you save the PDF, the title of the document usually starts with the name of the blog or web site.  Since this info is embedded in the document, I delete it and save the document under the rest of its title.  For recipes, I have a file on the computer for each blog that I save recipes from, and I save a recipe in the blog's file.  There is a nice video on PrintFriendly's web site showing the process I described above.  One last thing, you can use PrintFriendly even if the blog or web site has some other method for printing set up.

Sorry this is so long, but this information has been so valuable to me that I want to share it.

8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. Great article. I'm experiencing many of these issues as well..


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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  5. You can also highlight, copy and then paste to a new e-mail or word document. This works for me when there is no print button.

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