Simplest HTML to PDF Converter | Hacker News Reader

Simplest HTML to PDF Converter

dinkypage.com

8 pointsnitrohack9 comments

Why is this different (and/or simpler) from printing to a PDF file from your browser?

Why do so many people seem to want PDF output?

If there's a web page you want to save, why not just save it as .MHT? (IE does this natively, and FF via plugins). From that, you can still use links, you can copy-paste, etc.

PDF, on the other hand, is a black hole. You can look at it, but you can't (effectively) get any of the data or other content out to use later.

PDF makes sense where the layout is sacred (government forms) or where the ability to cite specific references by page number (research articles, judicial opinions). And it makes sense as the medium to carry material to be published to the publisher.

But I just can't see how it's useful as a document format for regular people.

Using a Mac for a month completely changed my perspective on PDFs. They're fast, look great, and integrate well into the system. In fact, all standard print dialogs even have a "PDF" button for quickly saving anything that's printable as a PDF.

Moreover, it's not a black hole. Text can be selected, copied, pasted, searched, and links are preserved. It's a handy, portable way to archive something, and without much loss of fidelity.

Emailing (scanned or whatever) PDFs is the new fax.

Most PDF reader programs will let you copy text/images from PDFs, to paste elsewhere. Kpdf under linux is good, but even Acroread will do something for you.

For MS-windows, I like PDFcreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ ), a print-to-PDF program. Note that many web pages have less extraneous stuff in the print view.

P.S. I believe that Gimp already reads in PDFs, and I'm not sure if OpenOffice wasn't supposed to also do that in some (upcoming?) version.

P.P.S. There's at least an OpenOffice 'PDF import extension'. This seems the latest/most-official: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

Will this reoccurring pattern of people reimplementing bash utilities for the web ever end?

Seems to merely wrap: http://www.freepdfconvert.com/

Why the middle man?

Calls http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/ to do the conversion

Doesn't work on my 100% valid site.

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