You’re viewing a web page on your iPad or iPhone and you want to save it as PDF. How do you do it?
There have long been applications (some good, some bad) that will do this, but with iOS9 it is (almost) built in to the operating system.
To do this you will need to have Apple’s free iBooks app installed. If you don’t already have it, you can download it here.
Once you have it installed, you can save any page as PDF right from Safari.
When you’re viewing a web page that you want to save, hit the Share button.
Next, in the top row of icons, swipe to the right and you’ll see a new icon called Save PDF to iBooks. Tap it.
In a few seconds, the iBooks app will open and your PDF will be there and stored in iBooks.
Now, there are a few limitations/things to note about this:
- The quality of the PDF that you get depends on how well the web page prints. For example, at the time of writing DocumentSnap doesn’t print very well. I’m working on that.
- iBooks has very limited sharing options. For some annoying reason, Apple didn’t include an “Open In…” button, so sharing is limited to emailing the PDF. You can’t (easily) open the PDF in another app. If that’s important to you, you’ll want to use another app like Readdle’s PDF Converter instead.
Those limitations aside, it’s nice to see this functionality built into iOS.
