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The PDF Blog

PDF news, information, software and user tips

Converting and Sharing Web Pages as PDFOctober 17

In all the excitement of our PDF Download 2.0 (Firefox add-on) release a month or so back, we barely mentioned a cool little free HTML to PDF service we launched at the same time.

The new Web-to-PDF feature in PDF Download 2.0 uses a Web server to quickly convert any (unsecured) Web page into a pretty good PDF replica, and it’s this service we employ for our lesser-known Web-based tool. 

The Web-based tool works in a similar way, except there’s no need for you to install anything. This is great if you use browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari or Google Chrome (which can’t run PDF Download), or you find yourself on a computer without the PDF Download add-on installed. 

How to convert using the Web/HTML-to-PDF service

To use the service, it’s simply a matter of copying the URL of the Web page you would like to convert, and then heading over to the Web-to-PDF page on the PDF Download site. Here’s how to do it step by step.

1. Go to the Web page you would like to convert. Then highlight the address/URL and copy it.

Follow Us on TwitterOctober 9

If you’re on Twitter already and want to stay in touch with the Nitro team, we recently opened our very own Twitter??Nitro PDF account.

We’ve taken ourselves into the Twitter world for a couple of reasons: Firstly, as another way to let readers know about new posts on our PDF Blog. And secondly, as a way of keeping an eye out for users of both Nitro Pro and Twitter who might have feedback for us or need our help to get the most out of PDF and Nitro Pro.

Sign up or learn more

If you’re already a Twitter user and would like to follow us, visit our Nitro PDF page and click the Follow button. If you’re not on Twitter but would like to learn more, visit

Question from a customer: “Will Nitro Pro accept that PDF file?”October 9

I was just scouring our sales inquires at the end of the day (something I like to do, see what questions and issues pre-sales are being asked) and noticed a question that is pretty straightforward for us PDF nerds, but I’m sure a others would think about it when considering a non-Adobe PDF solution.

Will Nitro compile an existing PDF file??? If we have a previously existing?? pdf file of an eBook with pics and text, that is free of any extra security settings in Adobe, will Nitro accept that pdf file and work with it to set the security settings?

The answer is absolutely. PDF is now an ISO standard, and even before this happened (in 2007) the PDF specification was published by Adobe each time a version of Acrobat was released. So 3rd party developers are able to learn about

How to Convert Extra-Large Excel Spreadsheets to PDFOctober 8

One of my biggest pet PDF peeves is converting large Excel spreadsheets to PDF. None of the settings I’d expect to work, such as printing just the cells I have selected or adjustnig the print margins do a thing.

The problem appears when converting spreadsheets containing a large amount of rows, columns or both. Excel decides on the margins based on a standard paper size, but to make spreadsheets really usable once in PDF or paper form,??often you need to shrink, expand, crop or adjust to get each sheet looking right.

Below I’ll look at a few ways to adjust things yourself, including a trick to manually set pages to break up pretty neatly. There’s a certain amount of trial and error in all this, but hopefully it’ll help you get out of those tough situations when trying to convert big spreadsheets to PDF. I’ve been tearing out a lot less hair lately!

These methods should work with any good PDF creator.

Print Area setting

In Microsoft Excel 2007 you might be tempted to play around with the Print Area settings (it is also included in previous versions of Excel). I wouldn’t don’t bother with it. It won’t help.

Adjust Page Breaks

Adjusting the page breaks is??a nice quick solution when you find that a few columns or rows are being cut off and included on an extra page in your PDF. For me it??works pretty well in Microsoft Excel 2007 but I’ve had less success with older versions of Excel.

Fill PDF Forms without Form FieldsOctober 7

There are two different kinds of PDF forms we all encounter from time to time: ‘dumb’ PDF forms that look like a form, but contain no form fields; and ’smart’ PDF forms, that contain active fields in which you can type, tick checkboxes, make calculations and more. The latter of course is the kind of form most of us would prefer, but in the real world not what we receive.??

Today we’ll look at how you can edit dumb PDF forms on your computer instead of having to print them out to complete them. To work with these kinds of forms you need a PDF editor that supports text editing and/or creating forms.??

Fill a PDF form with text fields

Using the Text Field form field is probably the best option if you may need make adjustments to the contents of form fields or even reuse the entire form later. Once the tool is selected, you can draw rectangles on the page(s)??quickly where information must be entered, and afterwards enter all your details. Text fields have the added benefit of allowing you to update the appearance of multiple form fields at once.??

For this example we’ll use Nitro PDF Professional, but you should be able to use any PDF form editor to get a similar resul