Sunday, January 24, 2010

Turn Web Pages Into PDFs

This one is courtesy of my genealogy and ham radio friend - Dick Eastman (Source URL: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/01/turn-web-pages-into-pdfs.html). Will be adding this to my Internet and Genealogy Class resource guide/handout. I will also demonstrate the usage of this website in class this semester.

"One of the many problems I find when surfing the web is that there are many interesting web sites, almost too many. I'd like to save many of them. My bookmark list in my web browser already contains thousands of links and I can never find what I want. I have tried various bookmark organizers but have never found one that I really like. Besides, when I go back to the site in the future the information that caught my eye today might no longer be there. A perfect example would be this newsletter web site where things change several times daily. I want to save a particular article so bookmarking the web site doesn't do much good.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way for you to capture a web page in its entirety, either for future reference or for sharing it with your friends without having to start sending links back and forth? I'd like to capture the web page as it exists today. Luckily, there is an easy method of doing just that.

PDFmyURL.com is a web service that captures web sites and converts them to PDF files. You can save the PDF files on your own computer, preserving them as they appeared at the moment you told PDFmyURL.com to make the copy. Best of all, even the links work properly. You simply cut and paste the URL you are interested in, and then a “download this page as PDF” link will be provided for you to retrieve the corresponding document.

A service such as this one also has the distinct advantage of letting your preserve pages forever. That is, even if the original page vanishes from the web you will still be able to access the information as it was, at the time you created a PDF of it. And you can also create PDFs of your own site in order to track its evolution.

Best of all, this is a free service.

Try it. Go to http://www.pdfmyurl.com.