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

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.

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

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)

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.

I realize that those of us who use Macs are in the minority, but there are several ways to do this on a Mac.

If you print a page, then click in the Print Dialog on Open pdf in Preview, you can save anything that can be printed as a pdf file. Unfortunately, you can't clink on the links.

I also use Readability to save pages for later reading in a format that is more felicitous than that presented on the web. Links within the article are clickable, Readability is cross platform, and there is a very nice client for the iPad.

You can also use Devonthink or Evernote--both have bookmarklets that allow you to save the webpage, and the links are clickable. In both of these programs(as well as others such as Together and Eaglefiler)you can organize the pages later.

Finally, I have been using Notesuite, which is a note taking program for the Mac. There is a bookmarklet in Firefox that allows you to clip the page to Notesuite. One of the pluses of Notesuite is that if the page is a multi-page article the program will put all of the parts together. Notesuite is also available for iOS, so I have my clippings available on my iPad as well.

Jim