Tools to Capture and Convert the Web

How to Convert an Entire Website to PDF for Offline Viewing?

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Sometimes it is important to have a PDF copy of a website. This may be for legal reasons, such as proving if someone has stolen your copyrighted material. By storing physical copies of your website at regular points in time.

Another common reason is to keep a copy of all your hard work before you close a website or blog. Often years of material may have been written. So rather than lose all of that content you can download the entire website in PDF form for posterity.

GrabzIt can easily convert your entire website to a set of PDF files, by using our easy to use web scraper, which is specialist software that can parse a website from the internet. To do this you must first create a scrape for our online web scraper. Our web scraper will then use this scrape to crawl across the link structure of your web site and create a PDF from each web page it finds.

Once the scrape is complete you will receive an email with a link to a ZIP download containing your entire website. Please be patient if you have converted a large website then this could take a little while to download. This can then be saved to your local hard drive, which will allow you to look at your website offline and still be print friendly, if required.

How to Create your Scrape

To make the job of creating a scrape that will save your website to PDF even simpler. We have created a template to do all of the hard work for you.

To get started load this template.

Then enter your Target URL, this URL is then automatically checked for errors and any required changes made. Keep the Automatically Start Scrape checkbox ticked, and your scrape will automatically start.

If you want your offline version of the website to have links that go to the correct PDF document for the webpage, then instead use the Scrape Template below. This template will replace the links in the PDF with special local links that connect all the converted web pages.

To link your PDF documents together use this template.

Customizing your Scrape

If you want to alter the template, uncheck the Automatically Start Scrape checkbox. One alteration would be to run the scrape on a regular schedule, for instance, to create regular copies of a website. On the Schedule Scrape tab, simply click the Repeat Scrape checkbox and then select how frequently you want the scrape to repeat. Then click Update to start the scrape.

As a side note, for proving copyright infringement. While each PDF file will have a created date visible through the file menu, to prove when the file was created, this can be manipulated. So as added protection you could also use GrabzIt’s timestamp watermark, which will add the time and date a PDF was created to the document. There is now a basic Copy Protection template that does this for you.

Your scrape will now begin. You can see its progress on the manage your scrapes page. It will tell you the current number of web pages that have been converted to PDF and if you expand the scrape you can see the current web page that is being saved as PDF. You can also download a snapshot of the pages that converted to PDF so far.

Remember, some browsers like Internet Explorer, may not allow you to view a PDF file natively. So you may need to install an application like Adobe Acrobat Reader before you can view the PDF files.

You can also all convert an entire website into DOCX by using this template.