Hook and Needles: Knitting and Crochet Blog (cool stuff, techniques, and things I find)

So far I’ve been lucky. All my favorite online patterns are still there, but no one knows when a website is going to disappear, so here’s an article on how to save your favorite patterns as PDFs, or print them without all the adds, menu bars, and sidebars.

Step 1: Isolate your pattern

Here’s a screenshot from Knitty’s Abotanicity pattern:

As you can see, it has banner ads, a side bar, a menu and a header graphic. It’s all nice, but you don’t want to save most of that information for posterity. So we’ll get rid of all of that with Aardvaark.

Aardvark comes as a Firefox extension, or as a bookmarklet for Safari, and Internet Explorer 7. This handy extension lets you alter a page to your liking. Once you activate Aardvark, by clicking in the bookmarklet or via Tools>Start Aardvaark in Firefox, you can use your mouse and the keyboard to select your pattern and remove unwanted items:

• “w”: Wider selection (the opposite is “n” for narrow)
• “i”: isolate this part (remove all else)
• “r”: remove selected
• “d”: de-widthify (remove the width from the selection so it stretches screen-wide)
• “h”: help in case you forget the commands
• “q”: quit when you are done

For my pattern I place my mouse on top of the pattern text, and then clicked “w” about three times, until the entire pattern text was selected (see red outline):

You can scroll up or down to make sure you got everything selected, and then click “i” (isolate) to remove everything else:

You can then click “w” to make sure it won’t print or save in a narrow column.

Once you are happy with the results, click “q” (you don’t want to print or save the red outline).

Step 2: Print or Save as PDF

If you have a mac, simply go to File > Print and select PDF > Save as PDF:

And violà! You can also simply choose to print instead of save as PDF.

If you are on Windows, you’ll need to install a little app called PrimoPDF, which basically lets you do the same thing. Or if you have Adobe Acrobat installed, use the PDFwriter from the printer menu.