Creating PDF files from a web browser using Acrobat X

Creating PDF files from a web browser using Acrobat X

Andy Hunsucker – October 10, 2010

Hello and welcome to today's presentation.

My name is Andy and I'll be guiding you through the material today.We are going to look at how to convert a web page into a PDF with a one button convert.

This has been available in Internet Explorer, but has never been available in Firefox before, so we're very excited about this.The button is going to appear right here in your web browser, and you can see it just says Convert, has a little PDF icon next to it.

But let's go ahead and look at the preferences first.

If you click the down arrow next to the convert button, you'll see a couple of options.

We are most interested in the preferences, so let's go ahead and select that.

And you can see that there are some conversion settings here.

It offers us a chance to select the file type: we can select either HTML or text depending on the content of the page.

We can ask it to create bookmarks and PDF tags, and put the headers and footers on a new page.

But I want to show you the settings for the actual HTML itself, so let's go ahead and click Settings.

We'll look at the Input Encoding here.

You can see that the default encoding is set to Roman, and we want to leave that alone unless the page doesn't specify, because normally, the website developer will place some information about that in the page, so we'll leave that up to them.We can also see some language specific fonts, and force settings for the text, the background and the links.

That's in case we want to set it up for our own purposes so we don't have to look at their styles, we can set up our own styles.And you can see under other settings here, the multimedia content.

There is multimedia content on this page, so what we want to look at is our options there.

We can either turn off multimedia capture so we don't select any of it, or we can have it embed when it's possible.

Now if it's not possible, it won't embed, which is bad.

So we want it to reference the content by URL.

This will cause a security warning in Acrobat, but it will allow us to put the content in there.

Let's go ahead and click OK.

We can also see in the page layout, we have some information about the page size, whether it's oriented portrait or landscape and that should all be pretty self-explanatory.

I'm going to go ahead and click OK here, and let's try the one button convert.

I'll click the Convert button - it will ask me where to save this, and I will save it just right here.

And we'll click save.And after a moment, it will open up, and you can see the video is here, and we can play the video if we want.

And it's all here.

Normally it would give you a security warning, but I've already had this loaded up, so it will avoid that.

Now let's take a look at Internet Explorer, and everything here is basically the same except for one particular option, and that is the Select button here.

This allows you to select particular sections of the webpage for conversion, so if I click this logo here, you can see it highlights in blue, and I can click this box and it highlights in blue, and maybe this box as well.

And if I click Convert, it will ask me to save it real quick.

And after a moment it will convert, and now this page is converted.

And you can see it has just selected the portions we wanted active.

So that is all for converting a web page to a PDF with one button convert through both Firefox and Internet Explorer.I hope this has been helpful, and thank you for watching.