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I want to create high-quality prints of a website, for a publication.

Screenshots can get very gritty when printed out, for no good reason. Embedded bitmap images can't be improved of course, but there is no reason why the fonts can't be rendered at higher resolution to make at least the text more readable.

What I've done until now is to set the screen resolution insanely high and make the browser fullscreen, then bump the font size - but that is a less than ideal solution because it will make the proportions of the page weird. And still the resolution is not magazine-quality.

Is there a program that will let me export html pages to a raster format at high resolution, or to a vector graphics format such as pdf or svg?

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  • Which OS / Browsers are you using ?
    – Dave Cheney
    May 25, 2009 at 9:53
  • I'm mostly using Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, although I'm willing to a different browser / OS for this task.
    – amarillion
    May 27, 2009 at 7:09

4 Answers 4

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Try the PDF Download bookmarklet. It will generate a high quality PDF of any webpage that is publicly accessible.

The results are a faithful rendering of the page generated by the Winnovative SDK. This provides a much better result than straight printing from the browser or taking screenshots as the text is still vector and only the images are scaled.

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On Mac OS X you are able to print to PDF, this works extremely well for my resume which I then have printed out at Kinkos and give out to potential employers.

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  • Interesting, which Browser do you use on Mac OS X?
    – amarillion
    May 25, 2009 at 9:26
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    any will work, printing to PDF is a function of the print engine so will work from any print-capable application.
    – Chopper3
    May 25, 2009 at 10:11
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    If you are on windows using cutePDF can give you the same options.
    – PixelSmack
    May 25, 2009 at 11:52
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Unfortunately the answer is no. Because most things that will give a vector output, wont give a faithful representation of the website. The best bet is to make a copy of the webpage, adjust it to a larger size(CSS), then use the browser to confirm it is as close as possible to the original.

Once you have it good enough (it will never be perfect), print to PDF then use a tool like adobe illustrator to import, retouch and export as encapsulated PDF, for inclusion in the publication.

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Using firefox's "print to file" option, you can get a very faithful representation of the site in vector format(postscript).

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  • I tried this option, it works in principle but it's not right for me because it uses the css style for printed pages, I want a faithful representation of what you see on the screen.
    – amarillion
    May 27, 2009 at 7:15

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