PDFmyURL.com - Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free | Hacker News Reader

PDFmyURL.com - Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free

pdfmyurl.com

39 pointsmatt120 comments

I'd seen this kind of thing before but voted up after checking out the 'advanced options' section. After some googling of those "man page" style options, I see now this is probably a web wrapper around [1] so I will more likely integrate that program directly into something I'm working on. But still bookmarking the site for quick jobs.

[1] - http://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf

I've been researching ways to print the timelines on my site, Preceden. There's a complicated mix of HTML and CSS and, needless to say, it doesn't print by simply clicking Print on the browser:

http://preceden.com/timelines/2-biographies/print

This is an awesome tool because I can just add a link to the conversion URL, and wam bam: printing capabilities.

I have to tweak the CSS on the print page a bit because the site renders it a bit differently than the browser, but it works really well.

Ooh -- if that works I could do my dashboards in HTML/CSS, print them to PDF, convert the PDF to an image file, and use that. That would make my life much easier, as producing the PDFs directly is a bit of a kludge. Thanks, I'll have to look into that later.

You should have a look at Flying Saucer/xhtmlrenderer (https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/). It handles every CSS rule I could throw at it. If you simply need a commandline app converting a XHTML file into a PDF, you're done in 10 lines of code.

Even better than a bookmarklet, make it so that anyone can type your URL in front of the one they want PDFed, and it will do so automatically. e.g. http://pdfmyurl.com/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190151

Aviary.com does this for site screenshots, and I love it.

I first heard of this mechanic when digg launched their ill-received url shortening service. I wish all url shortening services did this.

As far as the bookmarklet goes it would be nice if you could set some of the common options, page-size, orientation, with some nice checkboxes, like Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/).

For offline version I had been using this application for some time now...

WebKit HTML to PDF http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

This is a PDF generator which uses WebKit engine to render the HTML page and then converts to PDF. Has command line advanced options, like this site.

that is one awesome tool, simply powerful thank you for the tip.

No offense to the op but this is another reason why I prefer OS X to any other operating system.. this stuff is built in. You can print any site right to PDF from any browser (as it's an OS feature). No Adobe needed.

Try doing that with your Mac OS X and http://www.woothemes.com/demo/dailyedition/

Does it work correctly? pdfmyurl.com does and so do a few more online such services.

Safari allows me to save my site, mentioned below, to PDF perfectly but also fails on your link and the opposite is true for pdfmyurl.com.

Edit: It appears to be the advanced option "print-media-type" that is the problem. Browsers do it by default and if you have pdfmyurl.com use it, the link you posted will look bad. I suspect that this would not be a problem if the theme did not restrict its CSS to "screen". I believe all of the CSS is dumped by the browser when printing because of this directive. The fonts are still correct so the link tags without media attributes probably have those CSS rules.

I'm glad to see the print-media-type option but it's not close enough to what I get when I print a page and then "Save As PDF" in Safari or Chrome.

http://pdfmyurl.com?url=nirmalpatel.com/cv.html&-O=Portr... vs http://nirmalpatel.com/docs/Nirmal_Patel_CV.pdf

Nice job guys. This is off-topic but do you guys know of a good library to convert HTML to PDF (Python)? I'm wondering how did guys at pdfmyurl.com did it? Any ideas

Have a look at http://pdfcrowd.com - it is a service providing an html to pdf online API and it has bindings for python. It is in private beta now, so if you are interested please just contact me and I will send you an invitation key.

Hmm, looks good. Cannot find your email in your profile, can you kindly let me know your email? Or can you email me at rolf.oltmans@gmail.com. Thank you.

You can try pisa (xhtml2pdf) here: http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/ Pretty robust. I am having some trouble with bidirectional support, but otherwise looks good - it's an all-python solution.

I just tried it and it isn't working very well for some HTML pages. But thanks,anyway.

Excellent work - congratulations! Even ignoring the advanced options your converter is fast and produces accurate results!

Very well done!

Anyone know of a similar service that can handle MS-Office type documents?

Very nice, will be adding "print to pdf" support to my site post haste.

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