Apple’s App Store contains quite a significant number of quality iPad apps for PDF viewing, editing, annotation and organization. Hence, it is logical to save webpages as PDF for reference purposes. Without using any third-party app, webpages can be easily and quickly saved as PDF from within Safari.
Follow the steps below to create a bookmarklet (a bookmark having Javascript code) that can then be used to save any webpage as PDF.
1. Bookmark the current page (or, in fact, any other page; it doesn’t matter as the bookmarked address will be edited later in step 4). Simply tap the toolbar button shown in the image below and then select Bookmark.
2. In the title field, change the title to Convert to PDF (or Save as PDF etc.). Make sure that the bookmark is being saved to Bookmarks Bar as shown in the image below.
3. Press Save
4. Next edit this saved bookmark. Tap the bookmarks button and then Select Bookmarks Bar. Tap the Edit button and select Convert to PDF bookmark.
5. In the address field of the bookmark, copy and paste the following code:
javascript:pdf_url=location.href;location.href='http://pdfmyurl.com?url='+escape(pdf_url)
Done and ready to use!
To save a webpage as pdf, simply tap Convert to PDF from Safari toobar. The webpage will be converted to PDF and Safari will then display the rendered PDF. To save the PDF, simply tap the opened PDF document once for the regular Open In menu to appear. The PDF document can now be opened/saved in your favourite PDF app.
This bookmarklet utilizes the online pdf conversion service from pdfmyurl.com. If you would like to make use of any other online services for pdf conversion, just change the javascript code in step 5.