Sunday, April 29, 2012

Converting Your Blog to PDF Free


My blog contains information which isn't recorded anywhere else . I've used it as a log for my research and consult it often.   I've backed it up downloading it from Blogger. This file can only be opened using blogger. I wanted to save it in a format not dependent on Blogger to open and view. I've looked into Blog Publishing Companies Blog 2 Print and Blurb. These companies charge from $20.00 and up to print your blog in book form. I plan on printing my Forgey Family History in the near future so I would rather not devote that money to printing my blog. It sounds like my blog would cost about $70 to print in a soft cover at Blurb. As I stated I basically just don't want to lose all this work. A digital copy in a usable  Format was my goal to create today. I could print it later. I discovered I could save it as PDF. I used two different techniques to to do this. One technique was using the BlogBooker website. The final results were fair. The formatting is different from the actually format found at the blog. Different fonts and picture arrangement made everything a little confusing. It's not bad though and has a table of contents.
Create PDF from Print Screen
Another way I was able to create a Blog PDF was by using the print screen on my computer (see an example bottom). From print I was able to save the Blog as a PDF. This produced a result closest to the original blog layout. There was one hiccup. Two posts contained pictures over the text. This probably had to do with my layout not being correct for those two posts. I was not able to display all my posts on one page at blogger. I made seven PDF's and combined them together using this free software PDFbinder. I could have appended the PDF's when I saved them too. You can compare the two PDF layout here:

  1. Created by BlogBooker  http://archive.org/download/AksGenealogyBlogBook/t13vfm04-book.pdf
  2. Created by saving with Print Screen  http://ia701206.us.archive.org/25/items/MyGenealogyResearch/AksGenealogyResearchCompleteBlog.pdf

8 comments:

Mike said...

Thanks for the tips Annette!

Anonymous said...

I think you read my mind! I am really not interested in simply converting and printing as a book, but I would like to add many of the posts to books that I create for my family. I'm definitely going to try what you've mentioned. thanks!

Carly said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Carly said...

thanks for the tips. May I ask how long it takes BlogBooker to prepare the PDF? I tried several times and it took more than 20 min and I gave up...

Carly said...

Oh, I have the pdf now after tried again...the layout is confusing.

Annette said...

I noticed a problem with my blogbooker PDF layout. I had take a post out and create two PDF's so the layout would come out correct.

Car said...

Blogbooker is no longer available.

Annette Kapple said...

I was able to get into BlogBooker just now? Annette