How to save a list of links as PDFs?

[svendok]

I have an HTML file that's a long, long list of links to important articles. I want to save each of those links locally, preferably as a PDF.

Any suggestions on the best approach? Thanks in advance.

[Oralloy]

svendok,

If the link is to a file that's in a format other than .PDF, you're going to have to convert the file.

Assuming you're in windoze, what you can do is save each as a "Web Archive, Single File (*.mht)" file.

Then, you can go back over all the files and open them in MSWord.

Finally, you can "Print" each file to Acrobat format. (You may have to install a special print driver to do this step.)

Unfortunately lots of hand-crank work, but not an insurmountable obsticale.

Alternately, if you're really good with Perl or VBA, you can write a script which walks the page, down-loads each link, and then drives Word to perform the final processing.

Good Luck!
Oralloy

[svendok]

Thanks, Oralloy. Doing it manually is definitely out of the question, as there are thousands of links.

Want I want to do is save all my Delicious bookmarks to an HTML file and then somehow script each one being opened and saved as PDF. That way I can not only save them, but search their content locally using Google Desktop or whatever.

I'm okay at Perl and VBA, but I'm not familiar with the PDF functionality available in either. Maybe I need to post this question on a Perl and VBA forum and see what people say.

Mainly, I'm trying to see if there are any other, simpler solutions before I go this route.

Thanks.

[Oralloy]

svendok,

at two minutes each, you can do about 250 pages in a day.

in actuality, you'll be a lot faster, although you're going to be utterly bored to death.

perhaps hire a high-school student to grind away?

Ok, 'nuff said.

My approach would be to crack the file using Perl or VBA and create a flat file with a list of URLs.

Next step would be to build a program to process each URL in turn. Use Word VBA for this.

Then I'd modify the processor program to write a secondary file for the error cases.

Finally, the brains of the code - open word as an Application object under VBA, and then create new documents from each URL. [Probably needless to say, but if the document is already a PDF, or other non-word handlable document, you should either skip it or copy it directly.]

Once the document loads successfully, then print it using a PDF printer.

Successes are good.

Failures are logged.

It'll probably take you about a week to get it "right" and functioning smoothly.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

BTW, when you get it done, we'd all appreciate if you'd post a copy of the script. As you observed, you aren't the only person with these sorts of issues.

Cheers,
Oralloy