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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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kazinator·

Chrome has great HTML to PDF saving, which is in fact all I use it for.

My home-brew accounting software generates HTML invoices; I need them in PDF also, though.

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I had no idea Chrome could do that. Tried it just now and it works perfectly. Thanks!

Save page as? Note, I'm not refering to print to pdf here.

What's the difference?

Printing tries to reformat the page to fit on some paper size and often removes details such as the background. Often it would be nice to make a PDF that shows a screenshot of the full current page, extensions exist for this but ntjifn natively.

Why PDF then; it could be saved as a PNG, which an ImageMagick one-liner can turn into a PDF (or several of them into a multi-pager).

It would be good if a way was available for any application to take a full window screenshot, rather than the viewport screenshot.

PNG is an image format which is usually significantly larger than the corresponding PDF document and rendered at fixed quality. PDF is (mostly) a vector format which can be resized at will.

But "details such as the background" will probably consist of a whole lot of raster images.

Or just a block of colour which will be very efficient. If there are images they are probably jpegs and can be embedded in the PDF without any loss of quality while still keeping the quality benefits of a vector format for text.

> Why PDF then

It's nice to have the web page's text searchable without having to OCR the PNG.

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