Sunday, September 5, 2010

Save Web Page as PDF on iPad then Annotate

I was viewing the schedule for Twin Cities Code Camp on my iPad this morning and wanted to circle the talks I was interested in. I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to do this without some help. After some research here's what I came up with.
  1. Configure your iPad to sync Bookmarks with one of your browsers (I picked Safari)


  2. Add this Bookmarklet for converting web pages to PDF from PDF Download to Safari (originally found this tip on "The Heat Web")

  3. Sync your iPad with iTunes to get the Bookmarklet onto your iPad.
  4. Install one of the iPad PDF Annotation apps. I picked Noterize by Robert Stretch. I also looked at iAnnotate which I'll try next if I don't like Noterize.
  5. Browse to the web page you want to annotate, open your Bookmarks, and select Save Page As PDF
  6. Unfortuantely I had to hit stop and then "refresh" in Safari to get PDF Download to work (your results may vary)
  7. PDF Download will eventually open the page as a PDF. (it can take a while)
  8. Copy the URL of the PDF.
  9. Open Noterize, go to the root of your Notes and click Import PDF/PPT. Select the Web Browser option and paste in the copied URL.
  10. The PDF is now available to annotate.
I also highly recommend using Dropbox so you can easily save your annotations and view them on your computer or in other apps that support Dropbox. You can use Dropbox to easily get PDFs into Noterize from your computer as well.

Noterize does not automatically save your PDF's to Dropbox. You'll need to Share the PDF within Noterize after it has been annotated and then upload to Dropbox.

I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment or reply to @cdeutsch on Twitter if you find something useful.