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We have a few really large HTML files (60-100 MB) that we cannot convert to PDF with any reliability.

Adobe Acrobat 9 crashes - hits the 2GB limit for applications.

Open Office converts, but removes some of the anchors ().

ActivePDF webgrabber crashes.

Is using a 64 bit situation an option for this type of thing?

I see a bunch of options out there, but can they do better than Adobe Acrobat 9 itself?

PeterStrange
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11 Answers11

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Have you tried wkhtmltopdf? Its a command line utility that is super easy to use wkhtmltopdf:

Install wkhtmltopdf
Go to Start -> Run -> cmd

cd %Program Files%\wkhtmltopdf                     [press enter]
wkhtmltopdf.exe http://www.google.com google.pdf   [press enter]

viola. google.com saved to google.pdf.

If I remember correctly it does fairly well with its PDF compression

David Murdoch
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    Works really realiably. However I've hit some bugs (due to WebKit browser being used internally) with table headers repeated on every pdf page and overwriting table contents. – Filip Jul 11 '16 at 16:14
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I wonder if you could use Winnovative's HTML to PDF converter?

JMan
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The only way I could solve this problem was to convert pieces of HTML to PDF, then merge them in Adobe Acrobat 9.

Thanks for your suggestions. Really interesting learning about all these neat tools that are out there.

PeterStrange
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If you are having this problem, try using HTMLTidy to clean up the HTML. That got the size down by a lot and made things easier to work with!

PeterStrange
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You could try FoxIt's PDF creator. It's only $30 and they have a trial so you can see if it will do the job. Their reader is way better than Adobe's in my opinion so I would imagine that their writer is based on the same engine.

Other free options that you could try are pdfcreator or pdfill.

3dinfluence
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  • Thanks, I tried it and after 20 hours it did the job from IE. However, no links or named destinations were created so that is a no go. – PeterStrange Nov 16 '09 at 19:05
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Depending on the use case and if you could even display the HTML code in a viewer, you might think about PrimoPDF. "Print-to-PDF" technologies might not necessarily be ideal but could lessen the size burden.

Mike B
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ for free

raerek
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Know anyone with a Mac? if so then get them to open it with Preview and print to a PDF.

Chopper3
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Why are the HTML files so large - are they files you obtain from a third party, or are they generated by something inside you organisation? Could you write a script to split the HTML files up in to sections? Do they have links to images, could your script reduce the quality of the images to reduce the file size?

David Hicks
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I've printed pretty lengthy web pages to PDF using PDF995. Certainly not as large as you're talking about, but it worked very smoothly for me.

hometoast
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I know this might be slightly heretical.... could you: copy and paste it into word then use word to fashion the html document. Then use word again to save the document as pdf? Just an out of the box idea.

lilott8
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