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save webpage as pdf with clickable links?
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Posted by jimspoon
Sep 30, 2013 at 08:38 PM
In his thread Wayne talked about how he saves webpages to PDF files, and this got me thinking. I do the same (usually from Chrome as my default browser). I might use a PDF printer like Bullzip or the “Save as PDF” printer in Chrome. With these methods, the resulting PDF file does not have the clickable links that were in the original web page.
Made me wonder if there is a way to print PDFs with clickable links.
I just tried the “Print Friendly and PDF” extension for Chrome and found that it creates PDFs with clickable links.
Are any of you saving webpages to PDFs with clickable links, and if so, how are you doing it? What extensions/tools are you using? Is there a tool out there that stands out from the others?
thanks for your input. I can see this being a very useful tool.
jim
Posted by jimspoon
Sep 30, 2013 at 11:26 PM
followup ... the Chrome Print > Save to PDF option does preserve some links, but not all -
quote from http://www.coolmegabytes.com/save-web-page-as-pdf-without-chrome-extension/ :
After testing it for a while with a number of web pages, here is the result:
Sidebar sections were sometimes missing.
Only links that are started with http or www are clickable.
The title of the page is used as the file name by default.
Some text were missing.
By default, live link to the web page is added to each PDF page. The link can be found on the left
bottom side of every page. Y ou can remove these links by unticking the “Headers and footers”
option but this will remove the page number as well.
Posted by Wayne K
Oct 1, 2013 at 12:02 AM
Jim,
Lately I’ve been using the Firefox Addon “Print Pages to PDF.” It preserves clickable links. It also claims to convert Scrapbook files to pdf’s though I can’t test it right now because Scrapbook is incompatible with Firefox 22.
In Internet Explorer, I use the Convert plug-in that’s installed as part of Adobe Pro. It preserves links but unfortunately its not free.
Wayne
Posted by Wayne K
Oct 1, 2013 at 12:03 AM
I’ve had the same experience with “Print to PDF”. Some links are preserved but many are not. The biggest problem though is that it regularly butchers pages to the point that they’re unreadable (overlapping text, images on top of text, etc)
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 1, 2013 at 04:41 PM
jimspoon wrote:
>Only links that are started with http or www are clickable.
The following might be relevant, or not: I have found that whether such textual links are clickable also has to do with the PDF reader used. Acrobat will usually ignore anything not starting with www, whereas others like PDF-Xchange (the free viewer) will happily treat them as active URLs.
When producing a PDF for distribution, one must of course assume that it will be read in Acrobat, which the majority uses. However, if you only want the PDFs for your own information management, using a more ‘sensitive’ viewer might be a solution.
By the way, the PDF-Xchange viewer also includes a tool to turn areas (rectangles or polygons) into active links, along with several other goodies, but that’s another story.