If you ever find an occasion when you don’t have access to a web browser or the internet itself, having a hard copy of a particular web page could be useful. Whether it’s simply wanting to read an article or piece of information from your favourite websites, or getting a couple of pages of the day’s news, being able to access this while being offline is helpful. The obvious answer is to save the page through the browser but saving as an htm/html file includes all the images etc. in a folder as well, which could be quite a few files depending on the page content.
Another way of getting a copy of a web page is to save it as a single file such as an image or document. This has a few advantages in that you don’t need a browser to view it, just an image viewer will do, and it’s one all encompassing single file. A program called Web Page Saver is able to do this for you. The version that is available for free allows the entering of up to five web pages to download and convert in one session. You can though run the program multiple times to get a larger number of pages if required.
It can also create a report in the shape of an html index file so you can easily browse the pages that have been created if you do have access to a browser. The output files can be in one of four image formats of JPG, PNG, BMP and TIF although I would recommend PNG because it gave the smallest file size during testing. The JPG compression was obviously not very high and cannot be altered. The other and potentially most important output format is to a PDF document, great for longer or high content pages.
The download is only a couple of Megabytes and is a simple install. On first run of the program, it will pop up a window and ask you for a serial number, just choose ‘OK’ to run as an unregistered user with the five page limit.
Web Page Saver has a simple interface and the main window is the progress log when you start the conversion and the three main buttons. To add a page click the ‘Add URL(s)’ button where you can enter the full URL with one entry per line. The addresses can be imported if you have made a text file or CSV file, handy if you want to catch the same pages on a regular basis. Click ‘OK’ when finished.
The ‘Options’ window is where the save format can be chosen and you can also select a logo image for the report and also give it a custom title if you want to make it look more professional.
When you press ‘Start’ a requester will ask for the save location of the images and the report file. The whole process is reasonably quick and once done you can browse the dated folder where it was saved. Opening the WPS Report html file opens up a simple index type page to browse the created pages from. There is also a log file in the folder and the pages are saved in a 0000.PNG, 0001.PNG order.
If you want to create more than five entries in one report file by running the process several times, it is a simple case of adding a couple of lines to the original nav.htm report file for each extra image. On the first line of the two, change the image name and the text to show for the link. The second line is to edit the date and time. Copy and edit the same lines as many times as you like for multiple pages. Those with any html knowledge can edit the report files easily.
It’s probably just as well the program is so easy to use as the website seems to be a bit lacking in information or documentation.
Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7