Not a bad idea, and I used to save lots of web pages as PDFs in the distant past, but I've noticed that a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days. I see myriad problems these days: the page is truncated on the right (no matter how much you zoom out), or all pages come out blank after the first page, or the PDF gets rendered as an image (taking many megabytes per page) rather than as text, or the outer frame prints but inner frames with the actual content are missing.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
Very effective, very fast, very private. Bonus points if the PDF filename itself is derived from a well formulated <title> tag, such that you can just use “ls” ..
Yes, but that's a solution for the stuff you consciously save. While this is a solution for stuff you see but decide it was interesting weeks after you closed that tab and you only have a vague memory of what it was about.
Well, I consciously save anything I’ve been interested in for at least 2 minutes, it’s a perfectly good way to filter interests - and the PDF solution safeguards those interests from being exploited by third parties.
You could combine it with existing products like DevonThink that are meant for researchers organizing documents and provide tagging, semantic search, similarity graphs, and so on.
Every single web page I’ve found interesting, since the advent of the Web, I have printed to PDF and stored locally for my own personal reference.
Something like 80,000+ files - my own copy of my own Internet - indexable, searchable.
Available offline. Something to read when I am far out to sea.
There is no need to involve third parties in your Internet history - no matter how trustworthy they seem to want to appear.
Print to PDF, and you’ve got everything you need, safe and sound.