People save web pages to ensure they can retrieve information later without having to load it on the internet. It also is a way of retrieving a web page just in case the original web site has an outage or goes offline for whatever reason.
There are two basic ways of saving web pages, that being via the browser or "printing it" to a PDF.
Via the browser
The browser that has the absolute best web page save feature is Internet Explorer 8, due to the fact it can save entire web pages as a "Web Archive." When you click File/Save As (if you don’t see that in your IE 8, press ALT on your keyboard to bring up that menu,) you’ll see it as a save option:
When you choose to save it will "crunch" everything into a single file:
Why is this the best? Because it’s a single file that contains everything (and that’s why it’s labeled as an archive.) All the text, all the images and everything included. If you load it afterward, it looks exactly the way it was originally. It is to the best of my knowledge the only browser that does it right.
Other browsers, such as Firefox, save as "Web page, complete" and it’s nothing but a huge mess. An HTML file will be saved which is the web page, but a subfolder will also be created with all the images, JavaScript files, etc. You can literally get 20+ files out of a single web page save.
Love or hate IE 8, it rules the roost when it comes to web page archiving.
Drawbacks:
- Only one – it’s proprietary to IE 8. Otherwise it’s the best way to archive a web page.
Via PDF Creator
If you don’t use IE 8 and want a web to save web pages a single files that include images and so on, the best way to do this is to use PDF Creator to create PDF files. This is free software that will install a virtual print driver and can be used in your web browser of choice.
Once installed, go to any web page, load it, then click File/Print or press CTRL+P.
Choose PDF Creator from the window that appears:
..click OK.
The page will be crunched and made ready for PDF rendering:
You’ll see this:
Click the Save button at bottom right. You’ll be asked to name the file and where you want to save it to. Once done, the page is archived as a PDF.
Drawbacks:
- Many times the PDF creator will default to a serif font (Times New Roman) instead of the font seen on the original web page.
- Any links in the web page will not work in the PDF.
These drawbacks are usually acceptable being it’s the text you care about the most when it comes to a web page. Any images on the page will be embedded in the PDF; all text is searchable as well.
In addition, the PDF created even for very large web pages will be small in file size, suitable for sending in email if you want to send it off to a friend.
Via ScreenGrab
This is for Firefox only.
ScreenGrab is a FireFox plugin. It allows you to save a PNG or JPEG screen shot of any web page, but does so far better than ALT+PrintScreen. ScreenGrab will take an image of the entire page including the full length. The screen shot taken will look identical to what you see on-screen.
Drawbacks:
- Since the output file is an image, none of the text can be searched and links won’t work either.
- The default output file is a PNG. If the web page you save is very long, the file saved will be enormous.
- On very large web pages it can cause Firefox to freeze up when attempting to take a full screen shot, particularly on slower computers.
You can make the screen shot ScreenGrab takes to be smaller by purposely not using the browser maximized, because yes, ScreenGrab captures everything – including all the white space on the sides.
To use ScreenGrab, install the add-on, then on any web page, right-click and choose ScreenGrab:
"Complete Page/Frame" will save the entire page, length and all.
"Visible portion" only captures what the browser is displaying at that moment.
"Selection" allows you to select what you want captured.
"Window" acts like ALT+PrintScreen does.
Choosing to Save will save the file. Choosing to Copy will copy the image to the clipboard buffer where you can paste into another program such as an image editor, Word, etc.
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Opera is also able to save as mht format.
For casual users, I feel it is much better to skip these methods and head directly to Web Clippers.
I don’t know what’s the best method to educate people but do a search for these:
Surfulator (not free)
Scrapbook+ (firefox extension)
Evernote
and if you prefer online:
Diigo
Snipd.com
I have been saving web pages as .MHT for years.
And I get on my soapbox any chance I get to convert the masses.
I cannot understand why people are saving as complete web pages, with the baggage of an accompanying ….._files folder (which can contain paths 6 miles wide in there).
Using IE8 or 7 has complications, if you image your hard drive.
Say you have previously created an image, and your PC or hard drive crashes.
If you place your image in a new PC, you will have to do a repair, to get it to work with the new hardware.
IE8 will then shoot you in the foot, as the XP repair can only handle IE6
Alternative ways of saving as .MHT are -
1) Opera does it easily with Built in option when saving.
2) FireFox has an extension called unMHT which is perfect.
The only irritation with unMHT is it does not integrate into the Save dialog.
What you can do is set the keyboard shortcut to Ctrl Spacebar
Let me show how convenient this is.
Let us say you highlight a couple of words on the web page, which you want to be the name of your saved file.
You just use -
Ctrl C
Ctrl Spacebar
Ctrl V
Enter
Thanks Rob. I wasn’t familiar with UnMHT before. It would be nice to not always rely on Opera for saving/opening as .mht
I’m a newb at it and I was having problems making Firefox recognize the .mht file.
Whenever I try to have the file opened with Firefox, it keeps looping into the download dialog. Hope this extension fixes it.
Useful info . . I’ve downloaded Opera tonite to check it out. Two things! 1.I needed your article to remind me to use CTRL-S to save (couldn’t see any Help within Opera and 2)CTRL-S doesn’t supply the option you mentioned but HTML worked OK
I disagree… MHTL is only convenient because it is a single file. Yet it is not very portable nor standardized. It tries its best to preserve the layout and appearance of a site; but not always succeeds in doing so. They are also huge files; suitable for foolproof mail text attachments. I prefer save Web Page Complete, because I consider it to be 'an structured mini site rip', and to have a higher like close-enough rendering. Crummy ads, JS and all… For all that, I think it might better to have a generic option to be save as <format_of_your_choosing> + afterwards Zip (call it ZMHT, ZHTM, or whatever extension you'd like). This action should also be easy configurable and could easily be set as a default; for those of us that despise MHTML. The cache should also be more used; regardless of the format; instead of virtually trying to re-load/fresh every single bit of information.