Saving a web page to a PDF file for later offline viewing has just become a whole lot simpler thanks to the excellent pdfmyurl.com web service that aims to convert any URL you feed it into a downloadable PDF file. The application is particularly easy to use, looks good and returns some excellent results, making it the perfect tool for a beginner web user.
However, its magic doesn’t quite just end there.
Equipped with a host of settable options like layout, page size, dpi and zoom factor for example, pdfmyurl is geared towards allowing other developers to use the service either by making calls to it via an href anchor with the associated GET variables set, or even on their own servers if for instance they wanted to make use of the brilliant wgets functionality in order to rip a website down into PDF format.
For example:
wget -O opentracker.pdf "pdfmyurl.com?url=www.opentracker.net&-O=Landscape&--header-left=hello"
would result in the system generating a pdf file entitled opentracker.pdf in a landscape orientation and with a custom header text.
Particularly interesting for this system is the way it manages to keep menus and links active in the generated PDF file, meaning that should the page you saved as a PDF reference another article, you could still access that referenced article at a later stage by clicking on the link contained in the PDF file.
In other words, this whole damn system is simply put, pretty nifty! ;)
Related Link: http://www.pdfmyurl.com