In a recent post I talked about how to use Internet Explorer and Acrobat to download pages one at a time. Acrobat can do much, much more. There are times when you may want to get more than just a page, and ever since Acrobat 4, there has been a simple way to gather up entire websites.
The "Create PDF from web page" button is just the surface. I'll try to give you a flavor of what is possible, and why you might want to try it.
Why would you want to PDF an entire website? (Yes, I used "to PDF" as a verb. That seems like it has become common usage.) You may be doing research on a company for a takeover bid. The work requires you to spend many hours studying the company, but you don't want their network logs showing your IP address snooping around at all hours of the day and night. Or perhaps you want to preserve a website as evidence of how things looked on a certain day and time. Or to archive your own firm's website as a backup or "wayback machine." Perhaps you've found a site with lots of amazing material that you would like to keep available for quick reference, but you're not always online, the site doesn't have search capability, and you want to have it available and make notes on it.
In Acrobat, there are a couple of ways to get to the command that allows you to capture all or part of a website. On the Tasks toolbar is a button entitled "Create PDF." By clicking on that button, you will see that one of your options is "From Web Page." You can also use the File menu under "Create PDF." There are other commands under the Advanced menu > Web Capture. You use the Web Capture commands to make changes to an existing PDF.
This is one of those "iceberg" features in Acrobat. Like most of the dialogs in Acrobat, this deceptively simple interface puts a lot of power in your hands. Use it carefully . . .
Start by entering the web address in the address box. (It is easiest to just copy and paste it from the address bar of your browser.) The next step is to decide how much of the website you want.
How much you gather is determined by setting the "levels". Take a look at the links on your selected page -- they should be visible in the web browser as underlined or highlighted words, or perhaps as images or icons. Level 1 means you will collect only the page you are on. Level 2 gathers all the pages that are linked directly from the page you are on. Level 3 includes all the pages from second level pages, and so on. There is a checkbox for "get entire site." That's pretty self explanatory, but beware that some sites are HUGE. You can find your machine tied up for several minutes and choking on a 2000 page PDF. That may be exactly what you want. If it is, just be prepared for it to take awhile.
A webpage may have many links to other pages that are not part of the same website. You may or may not be interested in gathering all of those pages. You can control off-site links using the "stay on same path" and/or "stay on same server" checkboxes.
Use the "Settings" button to set up even more goodness using the PDF Settings boxes. Acrobat can organize the site for navigation, and even check sites for changes.
Websites are organized hierarchically, which makes it handy for Acrobat to create a Bookmark for every page. If you check the "Save refresh commands" box, you can check for updates and changes to a site, using the Web Capture tools under the Advanced menu.
In addition, the hyperlinks in your new PDF should work just as they do in your browser. If the link goes to a page you downloaded, it will link locally to the PDF page on your machine. If the link is to a webpage that you did not download (for example, it is on another site and you selected "stay on same path," the link is still active, and clicking on it will open it in your web browser.
Next time, I'll discuss how to use a combination of Acrobat's web features to provide a big boost to your legal research on sites like LexisNexis.
~~ Dave
Sometimes I have problems with this tool so I search for new one and I found this http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/
I like it because it has add-ons for browser. Quality of PDF is very good.
Posted by: Pavad | August 20, 2011 at 11:34 AM