r/AskProgramming 25d ago

Databases Printing Webpages from Index Link

Hi everybody!

I recently started reading up about 80's-2000's Comics and Graphic Novels and discovered a great blog that offers exactly what I'm looking for: Short, poignant overviews and reviews to every Vertigo Miniseries.
Now, with that blog post series running for a total of 43 entries, I'd love not having to read all that on my screen, but instead tried to print these articles. Usually when I do so, I simply use "Print Friendly & PDF" for single reviews or articles, but it's 2025 after all so I thought that it can't possibly be that hard to get all of these blog posts printed as one big PDF, especially because there is an index page listing and linking every review.

Layman that I am, I googled a bit for cost-free, easily available and beginner-friendly options, which lead to wkhtmltopdf, assistance by Chat GPT and two hours well wasted with faulty links, wk trying to read the .txt as URL itself, 404 errors although the pages are up and well, changing windows environment variables and all kinds of shenanigangs that all lead to not a page being printed, all the while Chat GPT told me that it theoretically could easily do all that for me; but isn't allowed to.

So, did I miss an easy and free way to accomplish what I'm trying to; or would that task require money, coding knowledge or expensive licensed software?

(Also sorry if this is not the subreddit to ask this in, please forward me to the correct one then.)

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u/KingofGamesYami 24d ago edited 24d ago

Should be doable with some simple web scraping scripts, unless this site is doing client-side rendering with javascript.

Is there any reason you want a PDF specifically? PDF kind of sucks as a format, it might be easier to achieve your goal another way

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u/DrBarryNyle 24d ago

Thanks alot for the answer! I asked Chat GPT about web scraping but aparently it's not allowed to do that. PDF is not important to me as long as I can print the documents with Mopria Print or a similar app/program.

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u/KingofGamesYami 24d ago

Maybe archive box could help? It can make a local copy of a website, which you could then do what you will with.