Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

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Wednesday August 24, 2005

RSS to PDF

Today's email newsletter from eWeek contained an article on a couple of sites that provide an RSS to PDF conversion service for free.

I've just given them both a try on my main blog RSS feed.

http://rss2pdf.com/: I was given the choice of whether I wanted to retain images (which I did). It then generated a PDF which I was able to save to disk and view in a decent PDF reader.
The results were a little disappointing. It captured the images, retained the hyperlinks and the basic blog entry structure, but seemed to lose basic formatting (like paragraphs and bulleted lists). The <blockquote>'s really confused it.
http://rss2pdf.org/: The talking head is cute but really not needed. No choice here about saving images.
This was better, but still inconsistent. Some images were saved; others were ~~missed~~ignored.
It initially retained both the format of paragraphs and bulleted lists, but for later blog entries it just lost it. Whole sections of text were missing and some sentences were incorrectly formatted (for example, bold text where it shouldn't have been).

I certainly can't afford the bucks for Acrobat 7 which also can do this, so a working free solution would be a wonderful thing.

Let's assume these are early days for both sites, and this will only get better.

( Aug 24 2005, 12:28:26 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? [link]
Music Album Covers done with Lego Mini Figures. [link]
High-Tech Glasses Help Improve Memory (I need these now. Hurry up MIT!) [link]
Old Plastic Bags Turn Into a Soccer Ball [link]
White Paper Plate Origami [link]
Extreme Pumpkins [link]
Render 1,000,000 trees in eight seconds [link]
Butterfly Alphabet [link]
Plants in Motion [link]
Phones for people with way too much money [link]
Stained Glass Photography [link]
What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? [link]
What if Photoshop was a web-service? [link]
The Nanoputians [link]
Dyslexia-friendly typeface [link]
Unicode Primer [link]
Shag Does the Enchanted Tiki Room [link]
November - National Novel Writing Month [link]
Tube Map with Walklines [link]
Hangman for the Mentally Disabled (time waster) [link]
Catch a Fly (time waster) [link]
Monkey Moon Lander (time waster) [link]
Office Space (time waster) [link]
Free Sign Language Course [link]
Undy Rug (and it's just $20.00! Why are you waiting?) [link]
The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products [link]
A Paper iPod (for those who can't afford the real thing).
The original link was gone, but the Wayback Machine had it. [link]