Print pages to Pdf

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by Miss Demeanor on Jan. 5, 2013 · permalink

After wrestling unsuccessfully for goodness-knows-how-long in trying to 'print' webpage content to a .pdf file, it suddenly occurred to me that there might exist a FireFox add-on which could save my head from exploding.

I was trying to 'print'/save information from a webpage - something I had been able to do in the past using Acrobat Pro/Distiller and Firefox, but this time, more content existed on the webpage which I finally figured out was causing the problem.

During multiple failed attempts, I noticed that Acrobat Distiller hung in creating the file at 25 pages. That seemed to be the tweaking point with FireFox/Acrobat Distiller. Try to 'print' from a webpage to .pdf resulting in a document exceeding 25 pages and Firefox crashes while Acrobat Distiller hangs and hangs and hangs and...

I stumbled onto this add-on, read the glowing reviews, installed it, and created a 39-page .pdf document almost immediately. EVEN MORE AMAZING, the resulting .pdf document this add-on created contained multi-layer bookmarks, page numbers, and content-related header/footers.

I started using FireFox years ago when the security holes in Internet Explorer were not being adequately addressed. Over time, I became more attached to FireFox because of some of their amazing add-on tools.

The Print Pages to PDF add-on is one of the more sophisticated tools on FireFox. I say 'sophisticated' because the user doesn't have to wrestle with relatively complex developer/programmer-type components. Some thought should be given, however, to configuring user-preferences. Several preference configs are available and easy to switch. At the minimum, I recommend un-checking the default external links box (and local links box as well), otherwise the document will be filled with hyperlinks trying to take the reader to the original website which can be extremely annoying. Hyperlinks in a .pdf can be removed with Adobe Acrobat software, but un-checking the links box in Print Pages to PDF works even better and doesn't require buying and learning Adobe Acrobat. I also recommend checking the print media box because the resulting .pdf document is easier to read. You'll have to play around with what works for you,

This is a high-quality add-on and one that folks doing online research will find useful to the extent they won't be able to live without it. Simply said: it works really, really fast and really, really well.