Saturday, July 25, 2015

Create high quality PDFs from webpages using Chrome’s built-in PDF Printer

Being that we are all, obviously, huge PDF fans, we have come across a very useful way to convert webpages to PDFs when using the Chrome browser. The Google Chrome browser comes with a built-in PDF printer which can be used for converting web articles into PDF.
It doesn’t allow for the conversion of any other types of document to PDF, just web pages. If you need anything else converted to a PDF, then you can use our own Cometdocs.
Compared to other web PDF printers, the Chrome printer produces very high quality PDF files. The printer does a good job of recreating the web page almost perfectly, with all text and pictures included. You can also selected and copy the text from the PDF, unlike with some other PDF printers, which just take a screenshot, creating PDFs which would have to go through OCR process in order to be converted to text.
The whole conversion process is pretty straightforward. Just right click anywhere on the page and choose the Print option.
Now in the list of printers, choose the option Print to PDF. As you can see on the right side there is a Print Preview as well, so you can see how will your PDF file look like.
After that, determine where you want the document to be saved, which completes this fast process.
However, the one problem that many complain about when printing web images is that there is too much clutter involved, meaning that the ads and other extraneous pictures are transferred to PDF as well.
One way to deal with this is to install a Chrome extension called Readability, which effectively removes this clutter from your PDF.
So if you want to print the web page to PDF, first you need to convert it to the Readability reading view like you see on the picture, and then repeat the process from above.

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