Create PDFs of Web Pages on iOS

Have you ever needed or wanted to create a PDF version of a webpage? Well now you can using the Workflow app and this post shows you how.

Have you ever found an interesting web article and you wanted to create a PDF of the webpage that you could save for later? Unfortunately Apple has yet to enable ‘Print to PDF’ yet and the most popular method so far has been to send the page to iBooks which will make you a lovely PDF, but then the only way to get it out of iBooks is via Messages or Mail.

However, there is another way using the app ‘Workflow‘ and this article will outline the simple steps needed to create a workflow in ‘Workflow‘ to create a PDF from a webpage on iOS.

  1. Get ‘Workflow‘ from the Apple App Store
  2. Open the app and click the ‘+’ to add a new workflow. You want to create an ‘Action Extension’ in which the three steps you need in your work flow are:
    1. ‘Get Article from Web Page’
    2. ‘Make PDF’
    3. ‘Quick Look’ though this could be substituted with something else like ‘Save to Dropbox’
  3. Save the workflow with whatever name you like
  4. When you are in Safari at the page you want to make into a PDF, you hit the share sheet button (square box with the up arrow) and select ‘Run Workflow’. When ‘Workflow’ opens you tap on the workflow you just created and a PDF will be created!
  5. If you used ‘Quick Look’ as your final step you can then use the share sheet at this point to send the PDF to another app of your choice in iOS.

Calibrate Your iPhone and iPad Battery

Is your battery percentage not reporting correctly or acting erratically? This post gives you a guide on how you can recalibrate your device battery. 

Have you ever noticed that one moment your iPhone or iPad is reading a certain battery percentage, then all of a sudden it drops 5 or 10%? Have you noticed that it sits at 1-2% for a very long time? Have you noticed that as soon as you plug it in that it suddenly jumps up by tens of percent?

All of these symptoms give an indication that your device is no longer able to accurately predict the amount of juice that it has in its battery. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong from a hardware point if view, more that you need to teach it to present the correct level of power to you – this is called recalibrating the battery. 

You can recalibrate your iPhone and iPad battery with a few simple steps:

  1. Use the device until it powers down of its own accord
  2. Leave the device off over night or for at least several hours
  3. Plug the device in and wait for it to start of its own accord
  4. As soon as it has started up and you are at the iOS home screen, power off your device
  5. Leave the device off whilst it charges to 100% and let it charge for a good few hours after it is full
  6. Unplug the device
  7. Power the device on and monitor how the battery percentage fairs, if it still isn’t quite right, repeat these steps again. If several attempts fail to resolve the issue then a clean install of iOS (not a restore) would be an appropriate step before you have to admit that it is an actual hardware issue

Why does your battery get like this? I’m not sure, but I would assume that plugging the device in for partial charges doesn’t help. It would be helpful to carry out these steps on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

Tip: How to Create PDFs From Mail App on iOS

One of the biggest issues on iOS and Mail.app for me is the lack functionality to quickly create a PDF. I very often want to PDF a receipt or software license e-mail and file away, this isn’t built in as standard. 

There is a work around, you can send the e-mail out to a free web service called PDFConvert.me. You simply forward your e-mail to pdfconvert@pdfconvert.me, and wait until they send you the PDF back. The site has a great privacy policy, essentially they keep your file/email as long as is required to do the conversion, then its deleted. 

If you are savvy, you can create some e-mail filters to deal with the return e-mail i.e. forward to Evernote or OneNote, Of course that is another missing functionally on iOS Mail.app.

Now the features don’t stop there, you can use different mail to addresses for different functionality:

  1. attachconvert@pdfconvert.me = makes the e-mail attachments into PDFs.
  2. pdfconvert@pdfconvert.me = full e-mail conversion to PDF, including headers.
  3. noheaders@pdfconvert.me = full e-mail conversion to PDF, without headers.
  4. markdown@pdfconvert.me = converts markdown content into PDF.
  5. webconvert@pdfconvert.me = converts a weblink in an e-mail to a PDF. For example a link to a blog post will return a PDF of that blog post.

I’ve included a contact card that you can put straight into your iOS contact app for these addresses.