

Amazing HTML to PDF Converter - flair259
http://html-pdf-converter.com/
No need to install any applications on your computer. The simple interface allows you to save web page as a PDF file in 1 click without registration!
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andreyf
Neat, but I don't remember the last time I looked at HTML and said "gee, I
sure wish I had this in PDF".

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psyklic
I save bank transactions, confirmation numbers, login info, shipping orders,
etc. for my records. Sure is more convenient than saving the HTML.

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cool-RR
How would you feed the bank statement page into this service?

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psyklic
you wouldn't. nor would i trust personal documents with this service. hence,
it's not very useful to me -- I use a PDF printer driver.

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blasdel
I wonder what software they're using underneath, there's no useful metadata in
the produced PDFs.

PrinceXML has some of the best stuff in this space, targeted towards companies
having the native versions of their documents be The Web, with the print
version produced from that. No bullshit about 'neutral' source formats, no
astronaut architecture. They share a CTO with Opera, but I don't think they
share any code. -- <http://www.princexml.com/overview/>

It's written in Mercury -- A pure, statically type-checked Prolog with
functional features --
<http://ftp.mercury.cs.mu.oz.au/information/features.html>

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AndrewO
PrinceXML is awesome. The company I used to work for writes large publications
primarily for the web, but sometimes needs to print book versions. With Prince
I was able to use an off the shelf CMS and write CSS3 Print stylesheets that
could make some very professional looking PDFs. With this I was able to
replace an error-prone and tedious workflow involving Word, XSLT, and
InDesign.

I know that might sound like an ad, but it's a really great app and I don't
mind going out on a limb to say it. Its implementation of CSS3 (even the non-
print parts) has yet to be matched (although browsers might be finally
catching up...). Their service is top-notch. I've posted a number of
questions, bugs, and feature requests on their forum and they've always been
answered directly by the CEO.

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ewiethoff
Cocoa apps: File -> Print -> Save As PDF. Probably scriptable with
AppleScript/osascript, though I haven't tried.

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sjs382
Does that preserve the css, too? In windows, "Print as PDF" does not.. I've
actually been looking for something like this for a long time.

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jncraton
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/>

This should let you print to a PDF exactly as you would print to a real
printer. The only difference is that you end up with a PDF file instead of a
physical printed copy. As far as CSS goes, I think that it prints websites
using the style sheets that are defined for printing, just as you would expect
from a real printer.

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sjs382
Yeah, but using the printer-specific style sheets is exactly what I do not
want. Which is why I find this tool useful. If I wanted to print the printer-
specific style sheets, I'd use Adobe's PDF printer driver, which I already
own.

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rg
The result was amazingly bad on one trial HTML page; font (Verdana) was mostly
far too small. This is a smart page that checks the display size and re-sets
em measurements for DIV's and text to account for the increasing density of
displays, so it's not entirely typical, but not weird either. But the
resulting PDF is useless, whereas printing to PDF in the usual way works
perfectly.

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karanbhangui
<http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/> is a really good library if you're looking for an
out-of-the-box library. Pandoc is also worth a look if you know Haskell or
don't mind command line calls.

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ars
I guess it's nice to have it as a web service, but: print to file, save as
postscript, run ps2pdf and you're done. Let the browser render it and you'll
be assured it's correct.

It should be really easy to add an option to firefox to do print to postscript
right from the command line.

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jncraton
It seems to just be a nicer front end to this service:
<http://web2pdf.freepdfconvert.com>

This service seems to be totally accessible using GET, so it would be easy to
embed this in a Firefox extension or better yet, just create a bookmark that
uses the %s replacement feature.

[http://web2pdf.freepdfconvert.com/HTMLtoPDFMaster.aspx?cURL=...](http://web2pdf.freepdfconvert.com/HTMLtoPDFMaster.aspx?cURL=news.ycombinator.com&title=HN)

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swaroop
I heard that the iterasiLite Firefox extension can save any page to PDF -
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10879>

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chanux
Tried to convert <http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes> but the output doesn't
show beyond the page 1. I use evince document viewer comes with Ubuntu. Dunno
what's wrong. Though we won't use it(converter) frequently it's good to have a
neat converter around :D.

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chanux
Just checked it with google.com & the PDF I got looked like it was looking at
google from IE :D

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tlrobinson
I've found OS X's PDF "printing" capability to be excellent, probably due to
Quartz (OS X's grahpics layer) using PDF as it's model:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_\(graphics_layer\)#Use_of_PDF)

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zandorg
One old trick of mine on Windows is to install an Apple Laserwriter, 'Print to
file', and then output the filename for the .ps to load into Ghostscript.

As a bonus, you can take out textual watermarks in some cases, because of the
Postscript being basically text.

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GiantCrayon
_scratches head_ I tried to convert my site
(<http://www.shiveringkittens.com>) and just got back the original form, with
no apparent PDF document to download. What'd I miss?

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charlesju
I like this. It is much better than Firefox and Safari. As for usage, I like
to save press articles and keep them as downloadable PDFs so that I can
quickly show someone on the road that we're a real company. Just one example.

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sjs382
This is great. I've been looking for a way to print to pdf, preserve css
styling, and keep text searchable for a while now. A bookmarklet for this
service would really put the icing on the cake, though.

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BigCanOfTuna
I'd like to know about the technology on the back end. Judging by the output,
it looks like someone just did a "Print to PDF" on OS X and then ran it
through Acrobat Pro for the OCR.

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gecko
Given that it renders my site completely atrociously for some reason I've not
bothered fully investigating, whereas the PDFs generated by Safari on OS X
look just fine (just checked), I can pretty well promise that they're doing
something else.

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jrockway
You can also implement something like this yourself with wkhtmltopdf:

<http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/>

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jackowayed
the PDF Download firefox extension (mostly made to keep firefox from trying to
open Adobe Reader within a tab because a very slow program within a fairly
slow program is unbearable) has for awhile had a "save this page as PDF"
option accessible from its address bar icon.

Not sure how the quality compares, but it's certainly more convenient. (I've
also never, ever used it because who wants HTML documents in a larger, less-
portable form?)

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pfisch
I tried this on a site and it proceeded to load forever.

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peterbraden
The results are seriously bad. Anti aliasing people. What rendering engine are
they using - ie6?

