26th April 2001
Coming from the "Truly Portable" Department, Lockergnomie Bruce Kunkle comes up with a way to grab pesky PDFs. We've talked about the Portable Document Format before -- it's awesome for both writers and readers. More and more Web teams have turned to this format for the quick and clean distribution of information. But, as this Gnomie illustrates, sometimes it ain't so easy. "You're reading a PDF file and you want to save it on your hard drive for offline viewing, but the 'save' command is grayed out in the file menu. Here's a slick work around. Click File, Send, and e-mail the page to yourself. The e-mail will arrive in your Inbox with the PDF file as an attachment -- which you can then save wherever you wish." That's one trick you shouldn't soon forget. It may also be possible to take a step back and right-click on the link to the PDF document. That "Save Target As..." option is a godsend for people who love to download stuff; it's what I use for every ZIP or EXE file on the Web. I know the option isn't available in HTML e-mail messages, which is EXACTLY why we upload each mailed issue to the Web and place a direct link at the bottom of each mailed newsletter. See, we're not so dumb after all.