A few weeks ago we announced Simple Print on Hacker News. It was very well received: getting voted onto to the front page of the site and staying there most of the day.
Simple Print converts web articles like blog posts and news stories into compact, printable PDFs. It uses the same article extraction code we use for Push to Kindle, but here the end result is a printable PDF rather than an ebook.
Mozilla developer Peter Bengtsson writes:
…I’m impressed. It can convert any article-like web page into a PDF. Not the first time we’ve seen that but this service really gets it right.
Boing Boing managing editor, Rob Beschizza writes:
Simple Print is a website that converts web articles into nice, easily-printed PDF files. It was remarkably effective on the URLs I fed it.
George Williams, associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate, wrote about it on the Chronicle for Higher Education blog: Make Web Content Printer Friendly With Simple Print.
Why would you use Simple Print instead of printing an article directly from your browser? Because, sadly, very little attention is paid to making web articles print-friendly anymore. When it comes to corporate news sources, we suspect it’s because the economics of web publishing have become so closely tied to getting clicks and showing ads that the actual experience of someone wanting to print and read an article away from the their screen is no longer a concern. For smaller, independent sites, perhaps it’s because they do not have the resources to devote to a good print experience.
Whatever the reason, we hope you find Simple Print useful. We think it produces readable results that not only look good, but also save you a lot of paper compared to printing directly from the site.
Here’s an example
Readers of our blog will know that this is something we’ve worked on before (read this for more technical details), but this version is much faster and relies on headless Chromium rather than Firefox to generate the final PDF (mainly because generating PDFs was better documented).
We’d love to know what you think.