Download or print an entire website as PDF

Question

I'm trying to make an offline version of a website and I'm looking for a tool that would do the task automatically for the whole web site (circa 1000 pages of HTML + images).

Is there anything like that and free that will print a full website to PDF?

Answer 1

To recursively collect HTML pages (and images, etc.) into a single PDF file? Adobe Acrobat can definitely do this, though it's not free. It'll maintain the intra-site links and everything, though it can be cripplingly slow on very large pages (like the printable version of Eloquent JavaScript).

I'm not aware of any free tools that do this.

Answer 2

If you want to make it into one pdf you could try this -

use wget or HTTrack(or any other such downloader)

set an option to download all files to one directory on your local computer (rather than mirroring the source site)

use a small shell script to loop over all the .html files and merger them

 for i in *.html; 
 do cat $i >> giantfile.html; 
 done

Then open this giantfile and print to pdf!!! that might be slow/impossible

BUT if all you need is an offline version of the site, just use wget or HTTrack. It will create a local mirror for you, browseable in any web browser.

Answer 3

Cute PDF is what I've always used:

http://www.cutepdf.com/

Again installs as a virtual printer. It also allows you to extract individual pages or merge pdfs.

Answer 4

Link: http://pdfmyurl.com/

This will convert a web page to a PDF document on-line for free.

Answer 5

Depends on your operating system.

On Windows: FreePDF (google it) for example. It installs as a virtual Printer that can "print" into PDF files.

On Mac: The printing system can output PDF on its own. Just open the "Print" dialog and hit the "PDF" button in the lower left corner.

On Linux: no idea.

Anyway this is more like a question for superuser.com ...

Answer 6

Adding to Techpriester's answer...

Ubuntu can create PDFs out of anything you can print - including web pages. Just File > Print like you normally do, then choose Print to File and PDF.

Answer 7

You can use a PDF printer, as some of the others have suggested, but if you go that route, you will need to use a web browser that allows you to print linked documents. To do this in Internet Explorer 8, click the Options tab on the print dialog and check the "Print all linked documents" box. Unfortunately, this may or may not work for you, depending on the link depth.

Firefox does not seem to have an equivalent feature built-in, although there might be a plugin available which allows you to print linked documents.

Unless you really need the archived website to be in PDF format, your best option is probably to use HTTrack, as suggested by bryan. HTTrack gives you a lot of options to restrict download size or how deeply you traverse a site, as well as specify whether you want to follow any external links or include non-HTML documents, among other things.