Creating a PDF of a web page for paying members of your site

Editors and journalists --and content providers in general-- have one thing in common: it’s not unusual for them to live by deadlines. If your publishing workflow requires you to first publish online and later convert your web page to a printable PDF file --a sort of magazine on demand-- you can save a lot of time using Safari’s Print feature and create a PDF of each content page you need to convert.

You could almost call this InDesign / QuarkXPress Server functionality on a tight budget. Safari will export your whole page to PDF, not just the visible part, and it will do so with backgrounds intact if you select the check box in the Print dialogue to let it. But in some workflows, even this simple “reverse engineering” trick will not work. Taking IT Enquirer as an example, the content pages do not have screenshots and images shown on them. Instead, users need to open a gallery in a new window where they can browse all available images for a story.

Even in that scenario, however, you can create PDFs from that online content faster than you think. Here is how… Assuming your Content Management System enables you to create a page that will hold only the text formatted as you wish, and with every image shown in a “standard” slot. In the case of IT Enquirer, I’m using ExpressionEngine, so I could set up a page that will hold all the text. Now, I have some 12 individual entry fields set up so I can cut my texts --which I locally write in TextMate or BBEdit-- into small chunks.

In-between those chunks, I would recall one image at a time instead of just calling up the whole gallery for the story. All this would be set up using a template. At editing time, I would then paste the text as required in the fields --I usually take two paragraphs per field-- and select each of the images in an order that makes sense in the text. 

Now I would almost be ready. I could now offer my paying users the opportunity to create a PDF themselves, by explaining them how to do that in Safari or Firefox. However, this would only apply to Mac users only, as Windows users don’t have PDF exporting capabilities that readily available. Instead, I could also chose to print my page in Safari to Postscript and run that file through Acrobat Distiller.

This would create a high-quality PDF file that I could offer to my premium members on the site. The only limitation with this technique is that you have only limited control over your layout. As it is all CSS-based, you can’t create anything as fancy as you can in InDesign or QuarkXPress. Ease os use comes at a price in this case!