July 29, 2011

With a $6.99 price tag, this app is not cheap. But it may be invaluable for you if you want to save content in PDF form for offline viewing or archiving.

There are many ways to obtain content to convert to PDF with this app, but the most common will probably be converting web pages. To convert web pages that you browse in Safari to PDF, you just prefix the URL/link to website with “pdf” so that protocol part of address becomes “pdfhttp” and you open website in this way:

Then, the document exchange mechanism of Apple iOS is used so that the given URL is passed to another app (here: PDF converter) and opened in that app. (For the sake of variety I am using here 23andMe content that is available only after logging-in.)

You might need to log-in again (as the apps are not taking over cookies from Safari for security reasons) and once you are ready to convert, just press the “Convert” button.

Once converted to PDF, the file can be opened further in other apps with “Open in…” feature (popular nowadays in many iOS apps).

Reading and using (like signing, making remarks/drawings) PDFs can be done in other apps. Here, for example, the previously generated PDF is viewed in iBooks app (which is comfortable to read due to stylish design):

One of main applications of this PDF converter app may be not just converting public websites to PDF but also private information or information behind the pay wall. For example, in a page with genetic testing results of myself and people who share genomes with me, I wouldn’t like to include in the PDF the list of people who share genomes with me (among them is mother of wife of Google’s founder), so the good news is one can copy only a portion of the webpage in Safari (or from any other app) and then one can open content of clipboard inside of this PDF converter app – ready to convert.

In this way you can save not only private or secret web pages, but also parts of web pages or parts of some content that can be copied to the clipboard.

Of course you can use other sources for files to be converted to PDF, including Dropbox,

iDisk, (to be replaced by iCloud soon), photos, contacts, etc. Generally other apps can use “Open in…” to open various content to get converted to PDF or one can use copy and paste.

I also checked that this app is making conversion locally and not sending your secret stuff to servers somewhere to convert (which would be a huge violation of privacy) by successfully converting inside of intranet (i.e. network behind firewall without access to it from Internet), with this app.

Generally this app can be used for many purposes and something like saving online banking statements, saving secret pages that are available only after log-in, or just saving save web pages with interesting articles that you would like to read later but also that you would like to read offline and be sure that if this page will be taken down or server will be dead – that you will be able to archive it and have it “forever and ever.”

Conclusion: this is one invaluable app and in situations where you need to show somebody some stuff without giving them password/access or because they wouldn’t bother to go there anyway, this app is a total life saver. Yes, it is not cheap ($6.99) but it more than paid off for me. Of course, there are a wide number of uses for this PDF converter app, but my favorites are archiving stuff forever and sending private information without giving access to websites as I did with sending of some sensible genetic testing results and genetic searches by going to genetic testing page, logging-in, and converting given results to PDF. This app is a must have for me! It’s absolutely worth buying.

To get this app, tap here: PDF Converter for iPad.

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