The Baseline Scenario

What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

Download The Blog (PDF)

Several readers have asked if they can download the contents of our blog and read them while disconnected. I couldn’t find an elegant solution,* so I went the low-tech route: I scrolled back through Google Reader for several months, copied all the posts for a given month, pasted them into Word, and converted to PDF. So each of these files includes all the posts for a single month. The main problem is that indented block quotes got un-indented in the transition to Word, so sometimes there will be paragraphs that look like they were written by us but were actually written by someone else. Hopefully you’ll be able to figure that out.

If anyone has suggestions for how to do this better please let me know.

* I tried Blurb, but even though it could see my blog, it got an error trying to slurp it. It worked fine with my personal blogs, so I suspect the problem has to do with my custom URL. WordPress.com doesn’t offer any good solutions. I think the best way would be to download the whole RSS feed and format it nicely, but I don’t have the skills for that.

Written by James Kwak

March 20, 2009 at 2:45 pm

7 Responses

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  1. [...] » At the request of several readers, I’ve printed entire months of blog posts to PDFs for download. There is also a “Download the Blog (PDF)” link in the sidebar under navigation. This [...]

    More Housekeeping: PDF Archives « The Baseline Scenario

    March 20, 2009 at 2:54 pm

  2. James – for simple PDF creating, here’s what I do. It’s similar to what you do, but avoids Word mangling your formatting.

    PDF Fill is a free PDF creator (for Windows) that installs as a printer driver. It shows up as a regular printer.

    Then you ‘print’ a post from within your browser, formatted with indents and all, select the ‘PDF Printer’. You browser prints to this driver, which formats it as PDF, and you save it as a PDF file.

    Steve Hamlin

    March 20, 2009 at 3:40 pm

  3. Also, are the emails sent out archived? If they are you could print those using Steve’s suggestion.

    Argel

    March 20, 2009 at 3:56 pm

  4. Yes, but then don’t I have one PDF for each post? I guess that’s not terrible. Maybe I could put them together in one file using Acrobat. (Don’t know, I don’t own Acrobat.)

    James Kwak

    March 20, 2009 at 5:14 pm

  5. a suggestion …

    The archive would be more readable if the articles were sorted oldest to newest rather than the opposite.

    It’s a little strange to have to skip up and down to try to read the blogs chronologically.

    DB

    DennisB

    March 20, 2009 at 10:00 pm

  6. Spend $50 for Clickbooks which will convert your text into imposed PDF 8-page signatures. These can then be folded by hand and side-stabled into nifty paperback books. 25 sheets of paper = 200 page book.
    I use it all the time.

    email me for details, Luke Lea luke.lea@gmail.com

    Luke Lea

    March 21, 2009 at 2:09 am

  7. Make that stapled instead of stabled. And use this other URL too if you don’t mind.

    Luke Lea

    March 21, 2009 at 2:11 am


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