How to Save Web Pages for Offline Reading in the Easiest Ways

Save web pages for offline reading

This afternoon we published an article that talked about Bookworm, a very interesting e-book reader for Linux. We have finished the article as a joke saying that it has the fault of not being useful to read this blog, unless we save the article to read it offline. There are many people interested in this, in being able to read articles offline, and many of them do not know how save web pages to read later, not without depending on the internet. In this article we will teach you the simplest ways.

Because yes, there are extensions like Drag to save for Firefox, but I'm not a big fan of installing software if it's not strictly necessary. Furthermore, browsers such as Mozilla's allow us to save web pages in different ways "out of the box", that is, by default. One of the methods is so simple that it is surprising. The other, also simple, is export web page to PDF, something we can do from the print menu.

Save web pages by dragging them to the desktop

This method is the simplest, but it does not work in all operating systems / graphics environments. Yes it works on Plasma + Firefox, and it couldn't be simpler and faster:

  1. The process is the same that we use to save a URL in the bookmarks bar. The first step is to bookmark the URL.
  2. With the URL selected, we click on it and drag the URL to the desktop.
  3. In other environments where it works, we just let go. In Plasma, where there are specific options, we choose "Copy here". What you will save will be an HTML document, but a simpler one without folders or dozens of files.

To open it, we can double click on it and will open in the default browser. Another option is to open it in a text editor, such as LibreOffice Writer, but what we will see in this case will not be as perfect as if we open it with the browser.

A method similar to this is to go to menu «Save as ...» and save the web page as HTML, but in this case it will create the HTML file together with a folder full of files that we cannot delete if we want everything to look perfectly. To get the same, save the page as "Web page, HTML only" (in Firefox).

Export a website to PDF

The other option that I was talking about that does work in any operating system, practically any web browser and in which you do not have to install anything extra is export web page to PDF. The process is simple:

  1. With the web page that we want to save open, we go to the printing options. In Firefox and Chrome it is in the "Print" option that we will see in the "hamburger" or the three dots. In both cases, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + P.
  2. Now we have to save the page as a PDF. In Chromium it is simpler, since it is the option that appears marked by default and we only have to click on «Save» one more time. In Firefox it is similar, as long as we do not have a connected printer: in the printers section, we choose "Print to a file" and then "Print". By default, the file is saved as mozilla.pdf in our personal folder.

Copy and paste in Writer

Page copied and pasted in Writer

Another simple way is copy the entire page and paste it into a compatible text editor with images, hyperlinks, fonts, etc. We would do it by following these steps:

  1. On the web page, we press Ctr + A to select everything.
  2. Next, we press Ctrl + C to copy the web page.
  3. We open, for example, LibreOffice Writer, installed by default in many Linux distributions.
  4. We press Ctrl + V to paste the web page.
  5. Bonus: what we will obtain with this method is quite acceptable, with the defects that the images can be too large and that we will see a frame around practically everything, but we can edit what we want from the same Writer. Once we have it to our liking, we save the file. If we export it to PDF, what we will get will be more than acceptable. If we are only interested in the article without frills, we can always do what is explained in this method from the reader mode of the browser.

The best option, always bearing in mind that We don't want to install extra software or complicate our lives a lot, is to export the pages to PDF from the same browser. PDFs are compatible with all types of document viewers and e-book readers, such as Bookworms that we told you about at the beginning of this article, which DOES work for reading. Linux Adictos.


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  1.   Ruben cigliutti said

    Thank you, it served me perfectly