Save a tree!
Save that WordPress page or post as a pdf instead of printing it to paper.
Recently I’ve been been working on a personal project that will hopefully help me become more professional and organized when it comes to invoicing clients and sending proposals. I think I’m on the right track – the first proposal I sent via my new method was accepted in less than 30 mins. I’m going to write about the system I’ve been working on soon but am still working out the details for the article.
Anyway, one of the the things I wanted to set up was allowing the client to save the documents as a pdf. The project I’m working on doesn’t utilize standard WordPress posts and pages so only one of the solutions listed below worked for me. I did, however, test them on a regular site and they all worked as advertised.
Save to PDF Plugins
- PrintFriendly & PDF – This is the solution I used for my project. They have a WordPress plugin as well as tools for Blogger and html websites. The plugin gives a choice of the style and location of the button. It makes great pdfs that can be edited before being saved – I’ve found the layout is better when images are removed. This plugin displays ads while generating the pdf but also has paid version for $4/month that is ad free. The website also has a tool where any site can be converted and saved as pdf by inputting the URL.
- article2pdf – I like this one quite a bit but it isn’t as easy to set up. A piece of code needs to be edited to the templates where you want the link to be located. It also has A LOT of settings. This is good because it has a lot of features but it can be confusing to some uses because you will need to create directories on your server and you will need to know or figure out the absolute path to them. Once I got the settings straight, however, a nice pdf was created of my posts.
- Joliprint – Joliprint is similar to PrintFriendly in that it can be used with different types of sites and they have a field one their site to convert any URL to a pdf. Their site also has a feature where you can create a mini pdf ebook with 10 URLs. I, however, could not get this one to work on either site I tested it on and got 404 errors. Others have been successful so maybe the issue was related to my server – I didn’t spend too much time trying to troubleshoot the problem because other solutions exist.
- PDF24 Article To PDF – This plugin worked great and the settings are easy to use. It generated a clean pdf in a snap. On their website they have free pdf tools such as a pdf creator and an online file converter
Have you used any of these tools or plugins? Do you have a favorite?
photo credit: Ella’s Dad
Is there a lot of call for saving blog posts as PDF’s?
It seems like it. There aren’t many comments here but there was a lot of positive feedback on twitter and facebook.
I’m setting up a client site where they can view proposals and invoices. By default they can print them but I wanted a way for them to be able to save as a pdf so they didn’t have to print. That’s why I started looking for one of these solutions.
Any reason to save as a PDF — and not upload the documents to cloud sites like Scribd for ease in sharing and embedding when applicable?
Well, the documents are private and require logging into the client area to access. I would prefer leaving them on my own system so I can manage everything in one place. The system has approval buttons for proposals and the invoice can be paid directly through paypal. I suppose I could upload copies of them but that seems redundant to me and I might as well just email them.
This looks interesting and useful, so does this provides an option at the end of the article to save that article as a PDF file?
A button will be added to the bottom of a post or page that the user can click on to print as a pdf. The code can also be added to the template manually if you want the button is a different location.
Just tried PDF24 on my site, but it didn’t work right. My articles were broken into pages using the “ tag, but the PDF only contained the page that was showing at the time. Perhaps I’ll ask them about that…
…oh I thought it was going to do that. The ” should be nextpage (I should have known better than to put the actual code in!)