LIS 568: Making Friends with PDFs

This week, I’ve got to share with you all a new discovery of my own-- PrintFriendly. It’s a web page that has extensions compatible with pretty much every browser out there, and it performs magic. Magic, I say!

It will turn any .pdf into a manageable nugget of information, erasing superfluous information (I’m looking at YOU, ads!) and resizing or deleting pictures, which can make creating worksheets a breeze for teachers or librarians! Without posting pictures and setting the spyders on me, let's just say that this work-around allowed me to delete Emma Stone's smile, a video for H&R Block, and the entire sidebar of creepy and maybe not-so-suitable Listverse links (my 7th graders would have a field day looking through the "10 Celebrities Who Had a Terrifying Ghostly Experience" list, I bet).

Last week, I mentioned that I had wanted to use a Listverse page in conjunction with InsertLearning, but that I was frustrated by the ads… and there are a few issues I have with sharing some of the text with my 12-year-old students. Well, I created a basic pathfinder by editing the page to rid it of all ads as well as some troublesome snark, and I now have a base for my kids to start learning. (I’ll add some nifty tasks to the base through Mac’s preview function, or Adobe Acrobat, depending on which works better for my needs.)

I was introduced to PrintFriendly during my internship with an elementary LMS, who used it to create a tutorial for 3rd-5th graders that wasn’t full of distracting commentary, and got down to the nitty-gritty of knotting paracords. It can be useful for streamlining any .pdf, so you won't feel forced to print every picture, every link, or every word... and especially, every ad. Happy editing!