How to read blog posts on an international flight? Saving articles and blogs with DropBox and PDFs

Tuesday, August 28, 2012 By Chris Hammond

So this is totally unrelated to DotNetNuke, as most of my posts tend to be, except that I am getting ready to travel for an extended trip overseas and I was wondering how could I take some blog posts and articles that I found online that I want to read, with me on the plane trip.

The problem with my flight being that I will be going overseas which pretty much rules out inflight internet (at least on United, which I have decided booking the flight on was a bad idea, but it is booked).

So how can I take some articles from websites with me, without having internet, and without killing trees? Well my Android tablet of course (I assume this would also work on an IPad, but no guarantees). Using my tablet, along with DropBox, and then of course a PDF reader (Amazon Kindle works) I can read articles that I’ve saved.

First things first, find the article you want to read, I won’t link to any, for fear of the authors/publishers getting upset about this process, but I found some from a magazine that you might read Outside. Find the article, then go to the Print view from the article (not all websites will have a print view, this one doesn’t, but that is okay). Go to Print the article, but instead of printing to paper, choose your PDF printer option. What? You don’t have a print to PDF option? Well go download the CutePDF Writer utility, it is free.

You need to print the article, choose the PDF option, and then SAVE the PDF somewhere, here is where DropBox comes in handy. I saved the articles I wanted to read to my local DropBox folder, into a folder called reading. These are saved locally onto my PC, but using dropbox they can be sync’d across multiple computers and even devices.

Now, to ensure you have them offline, meaning you can read them on your tablet while travelling, without internet access, be sure to go to the DropBox application on your tablet (or phone), find your Reading folder, and for each file in that folder be sure to mark it as a Favorite. This will ensure that the files are available offline, during your flight.

Haven’t signed up for DropBox yet? That’s okay, I have a nice URL here you can use to register. It is free up to something like 2gb, and if you’re taking more than 2gb of PDFs with you you are going to have enough reading for a few trips around the globe I would assume.

Steps for saving Articles to PDF and reading on your tablet, via DropBox.

  1. Find the Article online
  2. Print the article to PDF using CutePDF Writer
  3. Save the file to your local DropBox folder
  4. Install DropBox on your phone/tablet
  5. Find your Reading folder on your device
  6. Favorite the PDF files so that they are available offline
  7. Open PDF using your favorite viewer

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Chris Hammond

Chris Hammond is a father, husband, leader, software developer, photographer and car guy. Chris focuses on the latest in technology including artificial intelligence (AI) and has spent decades becoming an expert in ASP.NET and DotNetNuke (DNN) development. You will find a variety of posts relating to those topics here on the website. For more information check out the about Chris Hammond page.

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