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I have this online user guide that I want to print. The thing is it is uploaded as a website and each section is put into a separate link and printing it page by page is time consuming. Is there any application or browser extensions that will enable me to pull the entire thing and print it on paper or PDF?

Here is a link to the guide: http://download.brainvoyager.com/tbv/TBVUsersGuide/TurboBrainVoyagerUsersGuide.html

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  • If the start page contains all the links to follow up, Calibre might be worth a try (see my answer here). I've not yet tried it on an online source like that, though, hence just a comment instead of an answer (it worked fine on local sources this way, though).
    – Izzy
    Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 15:42
  • ink + paper would likely cost more than an ereader or cheap tablet to read it on
    – user4618
    Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 19:26
  • Related: Web page to PDF converter
    – kenorb
    Commented Aug 28, 2019 at 15:11

3 Answers 3

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Last time I had to do this I did it in two steps:

Step 1: Use GNU wget (free, Linux, Windows) to retrieve the pages as HTML. (e.g. using wget --mirror http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com)

Step 2: get a CLI to convert HTML to PDF, such as wkhtmltopdf (free and open source, binaries available for Windows, Mac and Linux).

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If you want to manually select which links on the website you are interested in before downloading them, you can get all links / pages on a website using a specialized tool such as linkchecker (or when possible simply get grep the links from the source code of the menu).

enter image description here

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    You are assuming all the content is statically downloaded HTML... what if the site generates part of its content via Javascript, or downloads additional content via Ajax and modifies the DOM dynamically? None of this will be available when using wget.
    – Jim Garrison
    Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 20:12
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    @JimGarrison Yeah in some cases you might want to bypass wget and directly use wkhtmltopdf as the latter can take URL as input and relies on the QT Webkit rendering engine, which should take care of most of Javascript (I'm not sure what happens if the website downloads additional content via Ajax and modifies the DOM dynamically, I haven't tried it AFAIR).
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 20:35
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Use python + Scrapy + BeautifulSoup to get the web site then you can either use a python pdf library or a tool such as pandoc to convert it to whatever you need.

All the above are free, cross platform and open source.

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WeasyPrint

Free (under a BSD license) and open-source solution helping web developers to create PDF documents. It turns simple HTML pages (with CSS, SVG) into PDF format. It aims to support web standards for printing.

It is based on various libraries but not on a full rendering engine like WebKit or Gecko. The CSS layout engine is written in Python, designed for pagination, and meant to be easy to hack on.

Related: Web page to PDF converter

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