TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:TOOLS: Convert HTML to PDF, maybe with HTMLDOC? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 25 Jun 2002 11:55:32 -0400
Joyce Fetterman needs <<... to convert HTML docs to PDF to provide users a
printable manual. I'd like to hear from any HTMLDOC users about your
experiences with the product... I'd be grateful for any other HTML to PDF
solutions.>>
Haven't tried HTMLDOC, but the current version of Acrobat (full version, not
Acrobat Reader) has a Web capture tool that may do what you need. I haven't
used it extensively, but my quick and thus unfair review is that it does an
adequate if inelegant job of capturing Web pages. Tweaking the settings for
this tool may produce much better results.
Probably the best approach would be to simply capture the HTML text itself
(most browsers let you save a Web page to disk), import it into your
favorite document-mangling software, and clean it up there. Once you've got
something printable, distill it to PDF. Of course, if you can get the source
files in the first place, why not work directly with them?
A note of caution: pages designed for the Web are not designed for print, so
you can't simply dump a Web page into PDF and expect it to produce a good
printable manual. Spend some time tweaking it as a kindness to your readers.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
personality, and an obnoxious one at that."--Kim Roper
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Check out RoboDemo for tutorials! It makes creating full-motion software
demonstrations and other onscreen support materials easy and intuitive.
Need RoboHelp? Save $100 on RoboHelp Office in May with our mail-in rebate.
Go to http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l
Your monthly sponsorship message here reaches more than
5000 technical writers, providing 2,500,000+ monthly impressions.
Contact Eric (ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com) for details and availability.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
