What is the best way to save webpage as a pdf?

[krs]

I'm trying to save a web page (which is more than a single page) as a pdf.

What would be the best way to do that?

I tried using the print command and the "Save as pdf", but that either cuts off some of the images or the images don't show at all.
Tried various page set up options, different orientations and different page sizes.
There is always something missing in the pdf - varies from setting to setting.

Tried Adobe Acrobat 9 which I have, that downloaded bits and pieces of the website but didn't create a pdf

Tried pdfEditor and pdfElement - they seem to be pretty much the same the way the UI is laid out, but with those I ended up with mostly blank pages as the pdf.

I'm tempted to use "Grab" to get a few 'screen shots' and then combine them into a pdf, but there has to be a better way.
Any suggestions?

The web page has text, some images and also a few links.
Need the text and images in the correct locations - don't care about the links

 

[ferrarr]

In my version of Safari (12.1.2), there is an option under File to Export as PDF, also on macOS Mojave.

 

[Slydude]

In my version of Safari (12.1.2), there is an option under File to Export as PDF, also on macOS Mojave.

You're right Bob but if I am understanding the original post correctly this has been tried using the Save As PDF version that was in earlier versions of Safari.

That method is good but not 100% accurate. Some elements of the page will be missing. On one of our shorter threads, for example, the page may appear correctly but longer threads may break in such a way that part of a post is missing as you near the bottom of the page. It's similar to what happens when you print a hard copy of the page.

 

[krs]

I have tried "Save as pdf", but from the print menu, not from Safari.

I tried the "Export to pdf" in Safari just now, the text seems to be OK but some of the images are missing completely.
I remember in the past when I tried to make pdf's (not necessarily from a web page), I would sometimes get a page break in the middle of an image.

 

[krs]

Well, poking around, I found a somewhat possible solution.

In Firefox, when one does a right click, the very bottom option is to take a screen shot.
I selected that and that gives one a cursor where one can select any part of the screen.
The nice thing is that one can drag the cursor down beyond the bottom of the screen which then causes the web page to scroll up and thus one can continue to select all of the web page (as far as one wants to scroll).
Once the whole web page has been selected that way, there are two options at the bottom right - either "copy" or download
I tried "copy" and then pasted that into TextEdit - that gave me the complete web page with text and images all in the right location, as an rtf file.

Converting that rtf into pdf went sort of OK, but the text became quite small and somewhat faint - not yet where I want it, but at least I'm making progress.

I'll try the download option next to see what that gives me.

 

[Slydude]

I have not tried any of them but there is software out there that can save webpages for off-line viewing. I have not used any of them in quite some time so I couldn't tell you which ones might be worth looking into.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I'm trying a couple options here (Safari 12.1.2 on Mojave), and here are my observations. Using "Save as PDF" via the print dialogue gives me a very different appearance of this very discussion here vs using "Export as PDF" from Safari's "File" menu. The Export option gives me the exact same appearance as the site looks in the browser, with the exception of page breaks. Unfortunately you can't get away without page breaks using the PDF format. PDF is intended to replicate on-screen the dimensions of real-world paper. Short of finding a 3rd party option that lets you use custom "paper" sizes (you'd have to create a crazy long one to be a single page), page breaks are unavoidable in this format. But try "Export" in Safari... that may work better.

EDIT: Dangit... I missed your followup comment where you tried the export option.

 

[krs]

By far the best option I found so far to save a web page in a format other than html is using the Firefox "Take a Screenshot" right-click.
What I had not noticed initially that there is then also an option at the top right that comes up where one can just select the complete webpage instead of scrolling down.
I have used that option a few times since and it work well each time, but I pasted the copy into TextEdit which works perfectly, but then trying to create a pdf from that TextEdit becomes a problem. For some reason the text ends up much smaller and is not really legible unless magnified.

Maybe I need to play around a bit more with the options - lik paste the copied website into Word, that would allow adjusting page breaks if required, and then converting the result to a pdf.
Creating a pdf directly from a wbpage (in Firefax, Safari or any other browser) seems to be a crap shot - one ever knows what one ends up with. Not only is the format totaly different, I find I often have some of the text actually missing completely

 

[krs]

Hmmm...

Just tried the following:

On this webpage right here
1. Opened with Firefox
2. Right-click on page and select "Take a Screenshot" at very bottom of dropdown
3. At top right then select either the whole page (which is what I did) or any part of the page
4. Choose "Download"
That will download the whole page as a .png file to whatever folder is set up in Firefox for web downloads
5. Open the downloaded .png file in Preview
6. Export page as a pdf
It seems if you use "Export as PDF... you get only the tiny reduced version of the webpage the way all of it fits on a single screen, if you select "Export..." and then choose pdf from the options, the pdf will be a single pdf but the full size.
Maybe viewing the png as "actual size" before creating the pdf will do the same - I haven't tried all the combinations.

I then tried opening that pdf with both Preview and also Acrobat Reader - worked perfectly both ways.

 

[IWT]

@krs

I've held off responding because I'm pretty sure you want either an in-house solution or a free app.

If what you are wanting to achieve is a regular thing, in other words, your are likely to be doing this frequently, AND, even more importantly, if you want links in the web page included - then there is an app that will do this, but it is pricey.

Because I do this a lot, I have for many years, used PDFpenPro. What you do is type the URL of the web page into the title space of the app. It will then fetch that web page automatically and convert it to a PDF. No cut pages, images intact etc. Done in a flash.

You can (or not) ask it to include links from the main web page. You decide how many layers you want it to follow and also the maximum number of pages you are willing to accept. This is an optional extra.

This is the link to their site: PDFpenPro - Mac PDF Editor - PDF Tools | Smile Software

Watch the video or look under "Put the Web in your PDFs".

I am bound to state that I have no connection with the company or its various products in any way whatsoever. I just pay for and use them.

Ian

 

[krs]

Ian,

Thanks for the suggestion, but PDFpenPro has the same problem.

I just tried the demo option of version 9 - the latest I can use with El Capitan, but I doubt later versions are any different.

The one problem is that one has to select a page size and page orientation before creating the pdf.
If the page size elected is too small, then the text is not rendered properly - if it's too large then the position of some of the text is not correct.
I tried US letter size both portrait and landscape, then A4 landscape and finally "tabloid" (which sounded BIG
With US letter and A4 the text was broken up - if a word was too long the pdf would just put the last four letters of the word on the next line
With tabloid the text was OK, but some of the webpage was way over on the right with a big wide space between the left and right part of the page.

But in all the pdfs created, even the tabloid size, the image on the webpage was totally missing.

Seems to me in general, PDFpenPro otherwise would be a good, and reasonably priced, replacement for Adobe Acrobat.
Can anyone comment who has both?

I bought version 9 of Acrobat many moons ago - it works a bit the same as PDFpenPro when trying to create a pdf from a webpage, but it does not work either.

I'm going to try my workaround on this webpage which btw was the one that I was working on when I started this thread - see if I can get that to work.

PS: Tried to create the page as pdf via
FF >Take screenshot >Export png as pdf
only took a few seconds and came out perfectly

 

[IWT]

So sorry that your version of PDFpenPro doesn't work. It was a reasonable thought though. Incidentally, the latest version is 11.1 which might/might not be relevant.

For what it's worth - not much probably - this is how mine is set up:



Sorry I couldn't help you

Ian

 

[krs]

Ian,
I very much appreciate you trying.
And I may buy PDFpenPro yet to replace Acrobat 9 which will no longer work once I get to 64-bit only apps.
Acrobat 9 is shaky right now and crashes more often than I like, but the new versions are too expensive for my taste.

My setup was exactly the same as what you show in your post.
One of the problems was that there is no option to make the "Page Size" flexible so that it automatically adapts to whatever page size the webpage is.
That would at least solve the text rendering issue.
Don't really know why the image would not show even when I tried 'tabloid' as Page Size.