One of our fellow WordPress superusers asked the question recently: “Why isn’t there a plugin to create PDFs from a WordPress page?” She works on a local real estate blog, and the subjects of her articles frequently request PDFs of their stories—which involves creating the PDFs by hand. We thought, “That’s odd.” Surely there must be such a plugin. And indeed there is! That’s the great thing about WordPress. Because it’s open source, there are thousands upon thousands of developers working to create new plugins for WordPress every day, and often… they’re even free.
In this case, we found several options. One of the simplest may be a plugin called “Print Friendly and PDF” plugin designed for WordPress. Its last update was released fairly recently (3 months ago) and its reviews are fairly good, which are two factors we look for. (If a plugin hasn’t had an update in a year or more, we consider it dead.) Here’s what we like about this potental plugin:
- It automatically generates “Printer Friendly” and “PDF” buttons for the front end of the website.
- The button itself can be customized.
- You can set the margins, alignment, and number of pages to print.
- It opens an on-page lightbox instead of a new tab or window.
- You can set up branded headers for the printed PDFs.
- You can set the PDF to include the URL so that users can find your site again later.
Another more robust plugin is PDF & Print by BestWebSoft. This one allows the use of shortcodes (a WordPress-specific code that lets you do things that would normally require complicated code—i.e., a code shortcut) in PDF and print output. It also lets you add custom styles, show the title and featured image in the PDF, and load additional fonts.
And there are other plugins that perform a similar but more specialized function. Say you run a recipe blog, and you’ve seen those nifty competitors’ websites that offer their users a button to print the recipe as a PDF, rather than printing the whole page. EasyRecipe is one of the most fully featured recipe plugins that still manages to be easy to use on the back end. It can auto-convert your plain text recipe posts, or it allows for Google Recipe View formatting (who knew that Google had this trick up its sleeve to make your recipes more Google-able?), ratings, and even conversion options if you’re switching from a previous recipe plugin like ZipList or RecipeSEO. A lot of these recipe plugins are not being updated regularly, so be sure to watch for that before choosing one.
But what if none of these plugins works precisely how you want it to? In that case, it’s entirely possible to create or modify a plugin. In fact, we did just that to create customized, dynamic tearsheets for our client Gordon Highlander. On any of the projects in their portfolio, the user simply clicks the tearsheet button, and an aesthetically pleasing PDF is generated—one that looks as if it might have been laid out professionally.
Need some help whipping your WordPress site with a printing or PDF plugin—or any other plugin, for that matter? We’d love to help! Call us at 214-321-1110 or contact us today.
