I don’t usually recommend beta versions of software. But this one isn’t likely to mess anything up… other than itself. I first noted “PDF Download” version 2 beta at Chris Pirillo’s blog this morning, and immediately went to sign up for downloading the beta. I received an email with download instructions from Nitro Software within about 15 minutes.
I’ve had problems with most software I’ve used to archive web pages as .PDF files. Usually, either the hyperlinks don’t work or the formatting is messed up. I haven’t done a lot of testing with PDF Download yet, but so far, I’m impressed. While it clipped the right hand character column from one of the pages I saved, it is a beta after all. Hyperlinks worked flawlessly and formatting generally looked great.
I liked the ease of use. It installs an icon on the right-hand side of the navigation toolbar. If you’re viewing a .HTML web page, clicking on the icon saves/emails the page as a PDF, depending on your preference. When you want to handle a .PDF from within Firefox, you have even more options. As a default action, you can set the extension to display a popup, open, download, or view it as HTML. Further you can choose to open it within your browser or to use an external .PDF viewer of your choice. Although I haven’t had time to try it out yet, it will also convert .PDF files to .HTML.
.PDF was adopted as an ISO standard last week, so I expect there will be more free and inexpensive software available soon to create and modify PDF files. For now, if you use Firefox, this one is worth a try.
