How to preserve your tutorials in PDF file format

Instructions for SaveYourself.ca customers who want to save tutorials as PDFs

My tutorials exist as web pages, and any web page can be saved in various file formats. This is mainly a method of preserving the document, so that you can use it long after your subscription has expired. It is also a way of moving the tutorial to other kinds of reading gadgets. Regardless of file type, saving the book always has one major advantage (you get to keep it forever), and one major problem (it doesn’t get updated like the live version). For an overview of your technological options, see Readin’, Printin’ and Savin’ SaveYourself tutorials.

I do not provide a PDF version of my tutorials, but you can easily make them into PDF files. It’s super easy on a Mac, and non-hard using Windows.

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is not the best file type for my tutorials, but it works. I recommend that all my customers save their purchased tutorials in the web archive file format (switch to those instructions). However, PDFs are more familiar to almost everyone, and they do have certain advantages — “portability” in particular. It is easy to move PDF files around and read them on almost anything that has a screen. For instance, to get a tutorial onto a Kindle (learn how), you need to start by making it into a PDF file.

PDF pros and cons

The main disadvantage here is that you’re creating a very simple PDF, as “dumb” as a print-out, lacking the features of a PDF that has been built from scratch. Creating a PDF this way results in a translation to PDF — with some things lost in translation — and not a document meant for PDF.

On the other hand, your going to be able to use that simple PDF with pretty much any kind of reader.

Mac instructions

On any Mac, anything that you can print on paper you can also easily “print” to a file in PDF format. Web archive files are superior, because they will retain all the functionality of the original tutorial. However, PDFs can be nice too. Here’s how to save a document as a PDF file on a Mac.

Choose Print from the File menu, or just press ⌘-P.
In the lower left hand-corner of the printing options window, there’s a pull-down menu labelled PDF. Choose Save as PDF. Some of the other PDF options may be of interest as well.

Windows instructions

Windows does not make it quite as easy as it is on a Mac, but it’s still very straightforward: you just need to install some software before you can start saving web documents as PDF files. Here’s a review describing reputable PDF creation software. His top pick is a program called PDF creator, and that’s my recommendation as well. And you will probably find it handy for other things.

Internet Explorer users should also wish to consider switching to Firefox for your web browsing, which has even easier and better options for PDF output, and is generally a much more secure application than Internet Explorer, plus at least ten other benefits.