In recent years, PDFs have become a great medium for keeping printable records of transactions, procedures and work flows to ensure your digital content is safely communicated between two parties.
The authenticity, reliability and portability of PDF documents, are now compelling big tech giants to include PDF technology to their web applications in one form or another.
Google, which has a huge presence on the internet itself, can’t ignore the huge acceptance of PDFs by Internet users. In recent years, Google has been paying special attention towards enhancing the capacity of search engines to index and read documents in the PDF format.
Moreover, Google has also enabled the use and creation of PDF documents. Take for example the online PDF reader for Google Book Search and Google Patent Search. This allows users to read PDFs directly and conveniently. And even GoogleDocs has been improved with PDF integration. You can upload PDF files from your hard disk or a URL.
However, it isn’t enough, is it? What about other Google apps?
Well, believe it or not, here’s a simple trick you can use to turn your Google Reader into a PDF creator.
PDF and Google Reader
As you know, Google Reader is widely used to subscribe, read and share their favourite feeds from various online resources.
And as you may also know, new functionalities and features have been added to the Google Reader to make it easier for its users to share those documents on various social networks like Digg, MySpace and Facebook.
This tip uses that same sharing option to create PDFs out of your favourite stories. To get those Reader documents as PDFs, you need to tinker around with Google Reader first. To do that, use the following steps:
1. Navigate to the Settings at the top right hand side of your Google Reader.
2. Navigate to Send To tab in the Settings Page.
3. In the Send To tab, you will see all the social websites where you can upload your reader documents. However, if any of your favourite social network is missing then you can add that using the “Create a Custom Link” at the bottom of the page. This same option can be used to add the PDF conversion feature to the Reader.
4.Click on the “Create a Custom Link” button and you will see the text boxes to add the Title, URL and the icon URL of the item to be added.
5. Type in the following lines in the Name, URL and icon URL respectively and save the changes.
6. Now, in order to save a story to your local hard disk, you simply need to go back to your Google Reader, select the story and click on the link Send To à Save as PDF as shown below:
In the case of Internet Explorer and Firefox, the online PDF creator will ask you to save or open the PDF. With Safari, the PDF will show up in the same window that tells you the progress of the PDF conversion. After that, you can then save the PDF file to your local hard disk and desired location.
So far, Google is moving in the right direction when it comes to PDFs, and we can expect the tech giant to add more features related to PDF editing, conversion and downloads in the near future.
