Posts Tagged ‘pdf’

Saving web page to pdf

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Sometimes it is a good idea to save a web page to a pdf file. For instance, I have just discovered that the quality newspaper Bangkok Post’s online pages are just free for the first 60 days after publication.

wine

The article above discusses how sensors are used in a Thai vineyard. Since my students are hungry for local use of sensors I wanted to save the page as pdf.

There are several ways to do this. The best result I got with PDF Download which is a free Internet service. I dragged an icon called ‘Save Page as PDF’  to my browser’s Bookmarks toolbar (I use Chrome), and when I find a web page to convert, I simply click Save Page as PDF and wait a moment to receive my PDF copy.

I tried PrimoPDF, but when I printed to its driver the result was not identical to the original. There are add-ons for Firefox that saves the entire web page as an image, but since people are more familiar with PDF files, and one may add text to them with CuteFTP, I prefer the pdf solution. It should be noted that the PDF files are really just images, one may not select part of the text.

The virtue of pdf

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Today I got an attachment in an email. It was a Microsoft Publisher file, but even though I have Publisher installed I could not read it.

pub2

Why I couldn’t read it was clearly spelt out:

pub1

However, even if I had the proper fonts on my machine it is a bad idea to send Publisher files.

Why? you cry!

Because it assumes I have the program installed, the same version as the sender, and possibly for the same operating system. That is a lot to assume!

The standard way is to send attachments as pdf files. pdf is an acronym for portable document format. Portable because it will look the same on all computers and all that is needed to read it is a free program like Foxit Reader.

If you use Adobe Reader you owe it to yourself to click the link to Foxit Reader to see why you should switch. Today!

A pdf file has additonal advantages. You can put a password on it. You can decide that one may not copy text from it or be able to print it. And more.

Let’s finish off with a question we will answer one day: How do I convert a file to a pdf? If you use Open Office it is a piece of cake. On the file menu there is an option for exporting the current document to pdf. But, what do you do with other programs?