• Mark for PDF retrieval

    By Philippe Creytens 2 decades ago

    Thomas

    The app works great for following up on news articles.

    Due to the temporary nature of some of these articles on news sites, it is very likely that some articles "vapourize" on these sites and later on are no longer available.



    To use your tool for research purposes I think that an added feature to "archiving" the article would be great.



    One reviews the link through the subscription feature and if interested can mark the document to make a PDF copy of the link and add it to the news item doc. In this way a "static" proof remains of the article.

    • PDF archive

      By Philippe Creytens 2 decades ago

      Thomas



      Over the last couple of weeks I have been having a go at writing an agent-based routine that spiders selected articles, prints the articles to PDF and attaches these for archiving purposes. The idea being that sometimes urls no longer work and that the iWatch DB becomes some kind of reference DB with useful articles.

      Unfortunately I had to stop my (several) attempts. The code to retrieve the info and attach the information worked fine, but I couldn't find a Java library that writes html to PDF in a decent way …

      I found several … either they didn't compile correctly, used outdated html standards that screwed up the positioning in the PDF or cost $2,500-$4,000 …

      Except if you have some other experience/references, it is back to square one.



      – PC

      • HTML to PDF

        By Pat Patterson 2 decades ago

        Have you seen HTMLDOC or iText recently (both open source)? They look like they may have the functionality.