RHFtech Help Desk

If you ever want to make a PDF from a website, fivefilters.org has the tools for you. These tools take a website’s content and turns it into a PDF, which can be read on your computer or printed and read on paper.

They have three tools for doing this.

Tool 1 – RSS to PDF Newspaper
The first tool is the most extensible one. You enter the RSS feed’s URL into the feed space on their website (see image below). Then select options, if you want. In the image below I chose to sort in descending date order, show images and fetch full-text articles. The output looks like this:

The above is a picture of page one of a three page PDF. I tried this with GigaOM and created a 16 page PDF.

Tool 2 – Feed to PDF
This bookmarklet converts a site’s RSS feed. It is a JavaScript applet that you drag into your bookmarks toolbar (AKA the favorites bar in Internet Explorer). Then when you find a website whose RSS feed you want to turn into a PDF you click on the bookmark while viewing that page. It then turns the feed into a PDF. This applet may only yield partial feeds if the author has set up the feed that way.

Tool 3 – Create PDF

This bookmarklet attempts to extract full-text content from a webpage or feed, unlike tool 2 above. It too is a JavaScript applet you drag into your bookmarks toolbar. Just like tool 2,  when you find a website you want to turn into a PDF you click on the bookmark while viewing that page. The applet then converts the page into a PDF.

Notes:
These tools did not always create the PDF that I expected. I suspect that is do to a combination of operator error (me), the target website’s design and a bit of flakiness on the JavaScript.

I also experimented with the similar Hewlett-Packard Tabbloid service. It lets you subscribe to a site and have the PDF emailed to you on a schedule you set. However, I did not like its output as much as the fivefilter.org PDFs.