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We have a few really large HTML files (60-100 MB) that we cannot convert to PDF with any reliability.

Adobe Acrobat 9 crashes - hits the 2GB limit for applications.

Open Office converts, but removes some of the anchors ().

ActivePDF webgrabber crashes.

Is using a 64 bit situation an option for this type of thing?

I see a bunch of options out there, but can they do better than Adobe Acrobat 9 itself?

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  • Rather good question. I am suprised this got closed.
    – Filip
    Jul 11, 2016 at 15:31

11 Answers 11

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Have you tried wkhtmltopdf? Its a command line utility that is super easy to use wkhtmltopdf:

Install wkhtmltopdf
Go to Start -> Run -> cmd

cd %Program Files%\wkhtmltopdf                     [press enter]
wkhtmltopdf.exe http://www.google.com google.pdf   [press enter]

viola. google.com saved to google.pdf.

If I remember correctly it does fairly well with its PDF compression

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    Works really realiably. However I've hit some bugs (due to WebKit browser being used internally) with table headers repeated on every pdf page and overwriting table contents.
    – Filip
    Jul 11, 2016 at 16:14
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The only way I could solve this problem was to convert pieces of HTML to PDF, then merge them in Adobe Acrobat 9.

Thanks for your suggestions. Really interesting learning about all these neat tools that are out there.

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I wonder if you could use Winnovative's HTML to PDF converter?

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You could try FoxIt's PDF creator. It's only $30 and they have a trial so you can see if it will do the job. Their reader is way better than Adobe's in my opinion so I would imagine that their writer is based on the same engine.

Other free options that you could try are pdfcreator or pdfill.

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  • Thanks, I tried it and after 20 hours it did the job from IE. However, no links or named destinations were created so that is a no go. Nov 16, 2009 at 19:05
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Depending on the use case and if you could even display the HTML code in a viewer, you might think about PrimoPDF. "Print-to-PDF" technologies might not necessarily be ideal but could lessen the size burden.

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  • PrimoPDF seem to fail for HTML of about 3000 pages.
    – Filip
    Jul 11, 2016 at 15:24
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ for free

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Know anyone with a Mac? if so then get them to open it with Preview and print to a PDF.

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Why are the HTML files so large - are they files you obtain from a third party, or are they generated by something inside you organisation? Could you write a script to split the HTML files up in to sections? Do they have links to images, could your script reduce the quality of the images to reduce the file size?

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  • It's just a large document. I could split it up but then the interlinking would be a problem. No images to speak of. :( Nov 16, 2009 at 19:04
  • Write a script to convert the HTML to PDF yourself, using something like Python and ReportLab? Nov 17, 2009 at 19:45
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I've printed pretty lengthy web pages to PDF using PDF995. Certainly not as large as you're talking about, but it worked very smoothly for me.

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I know this might be slightly heretical.... could you: copy and paste it into word then use word to fashion the html document. Then use word again to save the document as pdf? Just an out of the box idea.

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  • No go. Too big for Word, apparently! Feb 26, 2010 at 17:15
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If you are having this problem, try using HTMLTidy to clean up the HTML. That got the size down by a lot and made things easier to work with!

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