TUAW Tip: Screen Capture to PDF
TUAW reader Jakob writes that he often uses OS X's "Print as PDF" feature. He asks if there's a way to print only part of a website by dragging out a selection rectangle?
Yes, Jakob, there's a very simple way. Yesterday, I posted a Terminal Tip about using OS X's built in command-line screencapture utility. What I didn't mention in that post was that screencapture allows you to grab your shots in PDF format. To use the mouse to capture a rectangle from the screen and then save it to PDF, just issue a command along the following lines:
% screencapture -i -s -tpdf ~/Desktop/foo.pdf
And if you're not big on using Terminal and the Command line, here's another way to approach the problem with Grab. Launch Grab from Applications/Utilities and choose Capture -> Selection. Use the cross hairs to select part of the screen and then print the results to PDF (File -> Print, then PDF -> Save as PDF).
If you need to capture more data than a single screen will allow, consider Paparazzi. It's a donate-ware utility that allows you to enter a URL and a screen size. It loads the web page from the URL you provide and produces an image from that data--regardless of whether you'd have to scroll the screen to see the entire page in a normal web browser. No, it won't save to PDF, but it's pretty easy to convert the images if you have to. Update: The latest version of Paparazzi will save to PDF including searchable text.
In a follow-up message, Jakob mentioned that he's really interested in producing a searchable result. Sure you can save to a web archive but both web archives (use File -> Save as or File -> Save Page as or the equivalent in your favorite browser) and his current method of printing to PDF create pretty big files, even if they are searchable. So here's my final recommendation: invest in Acrobat, not just in Acrobat Reader. In Acrobat, use Document->Extract Pages to save only those portions of the web page you want to keep and delete the rest.
