Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Ask HN: Best way to save page for offline reading?
19 points by tablock 3802 days ago
What's the best way to save a website page for offline reading and archiving purposes so it can be used several years later? I don't want to rely on a service such as Pocket. A consideration is that sometimes the layout of the page is important so print preview and saving as a pdf is not always optimal.
7 comments

The "Mozilla Archive Format" Firefox add-on [1] can save pages to a single compressed MAFF file, or a MHTML file. Chrome has built-in support to save pages in MHTML format, but you have to enable it [2]. You can then view the archives later in the browser.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mozilla-archive-for...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML#Google_Chrome

I didn't know it could be enabled in chrome. Tried enabling it in vivaldi(as its chromium based) but now it crashes on launch.

I also use "too many tabs" add on so that the page content can be read later once added to too many tabs. To save page content I use different archive formats available upon installing "Mozilla Archive Format" Firefox add-on

Send to Kindle plugin works great for me. I usually wait till bedtime, then read most articles that I had sent to Kindle during day. If anything is interesting enough, I will save the article otherwise I just delete it.
Depends on what content the page has and how the layout is in HTML. I have 3 ways of saving: 1. as a web page - HTML only 2. as a complete web page - HTML and assets (images, etc) 3. a copy & paste into Word or a memo program

a lot of web pages nowadays, especially in blogs have so much crap like tracking links and advertising. When I save via #1 or 2, I first go into Firebug and delete DOM elements that clutter up the saved HTML.

If I copy & paste into Word, it copies the markup info like hyperlinks. If I don't want this, I first copy into Notepad, then into Word, to get rid of this.

Pinboard (pinboard.in) provides this as a premium add-on to your account. It costs $25/year, and you can access your archived links at any time:

https://pinboard.in/faq/#download_archived

Right click and press save as. Webpage (complete) will download all resources locally.
wget with the mirror option, if saving the original markup is a priority.
I use send to kindle