It’s possible to save a Web page as a PDF (Portable Document Format). Print-to-PDF, rather than print to an external printer, is a feature of many Web browsers that works well in some cases.
For example, when I pay bills online I use print-to-PDF to make electronic copies of the payment receipts from my bank.
In contrast, print-to-PDF might not work well when printing a blog post with embedded advertisements.
I tested print-to-PDF using Google “Chrome” and Mozilla “Firefox” to save a few of the posts from my photoblog. The results looked bad. I had to find a better solution.
That’s when I discovered Apple “Safari” can be used to convert Web pages to PDFs that look fairly good. Some of the Web page formatting might be lost but the PDFs are ad-free and interactive (with Internet access) — that’s win-win! Here’s how it works.
How to use Apple Safari to convert a Web page to PDF
A computer running Apple macOS is required. Step-by-step directions are as follows.
- Launch Apple “Safari.”
- Open a Web page in Safari.
- Select View / Show Reader
- Select File / Export as PDF…
- Click the <Save> button.
The “Reader” view in Safari displays text and graphics only; advertisements are not shown.
For example, I used Safari to create a PDF version of “Collecting odonate exuviae,” one of my recent blog posts. The following graphic shows a screenshot of the first page from the PDF. A link to the entire PDF is provided in the image caption.
(See complete PDF version of “Collecting odonate exuviae.”)
Buoyed by success, I used Safari to create a PDF version of “Hunting spiketail dragonflies in Virginia,” another one of my recent blog posts. The following graphic shows a screenshot of the first page from the PDF.
(See complete PDF version of “Hunting spiketail dragonflies in Virginia.”)
If you compare/contrast the Web version with the PDF version of both blog posts, then you will see the PDF version isn’t a perfect copy of the Web version. Some PDFs will look better than others.
How to use Apple Preview to “mask” unwanted content
Some minor clean-up of the PDF output might be necessary, depending upon the Web page. Here’s how I use Apple “Preview” to “mask” unwanted content.
- Launch Apple “Preview.”
- Select View / Show Markup Toolbar
- Set the border color to White. Set the fill color to White. [See the larger red rectangle that highlights these two settings, as shown in the following screen grab.]
- To add a new all-white shape, click the Shapes icon and select the rectangle shape; click-and-drag to reposition and resize the rectangle, as necessary. [See the smaller red rectangle that highlights this setting, below.]
Screen grab showing Apple “Preview.”
In case you’re confused by what is shown in the preceding screenshot, notice you can see two iterations of the “Markup Toolbar”: the upper version is the one used to add the red rectangles to the document that appears in the “floating” window; the lower version is the one used to create three white rectangles that were placed over content that I wanted to mask. You can’t see those white rectangles but they are there.
Related Resources
- “Collecting odonate exuviae”: Web version; PDF version, Apple macOS and “Safari” (360 KB).
- “Hunting spiketail dragonflies in Virginia”: Web version; PDF version, Apple macOS and “Safari” (236 KB).
Copyright © 2022 Walter Sanford. All rights reserved.
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