10.3: Print web pages to TextEdit

Nov 19, '03 11:20:00AM

Contributed by: Han Solo

Many web sites, especially news sites, offer some sort of "printable page" option. For an example, click on "Print Hint" below. One advantage of OS X is "Print to PDF" to render nice digital copies of such pages to file and read later. However, "Print to PDF" offers at best limited control over how the page(s) looks, and does not imbed links. With Panther, one can instead "select all" on the desired web page, then copy and paste (or select "New Window Containing Selection" under Services -> TextEdit) into TextEdit: this will preserve the style, color, etc. of the text -- as well as imbed (most) images and links (though background colors and multi-column pages are not preserved). Unlike PDFs, one can then easily edit the resulting file -- changing fonts or margins, editing out any unnecessary content (such as banner ads), etc. -- and still preserve the URLs within the file for future reference. (And then print the result to PDF, if desired.)

By contrast, in Jaguar the same action captures neither the clickable links nor the images.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031112201415792