USF Graduate Studies- Thesis and Dissertation Tutorials: Web Capture



Graduate Studies > Thesis and Dissertation Information > Tutorials > Using Adobe Acrobat's Web Capture

Tutorials: Saving From the Web with Adobe Acrobat

Capturing websites or web pages with Adobe Acrobat is easy and confers several benefits on your thesis or dissertation: if you cite a web page or information available only on a website in your document, you must include it within the main document (we recommend in the appendix) to insure that future readers will still be able to read the information; or, if you have created a website as your thesis or dissertation, you can capture it to a stable format for submission to the Graduate Studies office.

This tutorial assumes you are already familiar with the basic workings of a desktop computer, such as the use of a keyboard and mouse.

Note: In order to capture web pages, your computer must be connected to the Internet. If you are not in a campus lab, follow your typical routine to connect to the Internet before attempting the web capture.

To begin, open Adobe Acrobat 5.0 by double-clicking on the desktop icon, or by opening it from the Start menu.

Go to Tools --> Web Capture --> Open Web Page.

In the URL box, type the URL for the web page you wish to capture (in this example, www.grad.usf.edu). Websites typically branch deeper into different levels: from www.grad.usf.edu, you can go to www.grad.usf.edu/thesis_dissertation.asp; thesis_dissertation.asp is on the second level of the website. If you follow a link off thesis_dissertation.asp to, say, www.grad.usf.edu/Thesis_and_Dissertations/thesis_dissertation_Info.asp, you are now in the third level of the website.

Adobe Acrobat allows you to choose how many levels deep into the website you wish to capture. If you want only the web page you're looking at, leave Levels set to 1. If you'd like a few more layers of the website, add additional levels.

If you choose to capture more than one level of a website, you may need to set the checkbox options. Check Only Get Pages Under Same Path if you want to record only the pages that follow the same path -- for instance, www.grad.usf.edu/Thesis_and_Dissertations/ -- then Acrobat will capture only the web pages in that directory path. If you check Stay on Same Server, Acrobat will ignore links to pages off the server; if this option is left unchecked and, for instance, there was a link to www.cnn.com on www.grad.usf.edu, then you would capture the first page on the CNN site along with the rest of the pages on www.grad.usf.edu.

If you want to capture an entire site, click the Get Entire Site option. Be careful! Sites are often larger and deeper than they appear. If you choose this option, you may be waiting a very long time for the site to finish downloading. Investigate the site carefully and choose the option that best serves your needs. Otherwise you may end up having to delete a lot of extraneous matter from your PDF.

Once you hit 'Download', the Download Status dialogue box will open to keep you informed of how many pages have been downloaded. Unless you stop the download prematurely, Acrobat will follow all the links according to the options you set and then close this box.

Once the download is complete, you will have a new PDF based on the webpage. Your capture is complete!

Special Settings

At some point, you may need to fine-tune Acrobat's web capture function. In order to do so, again, go to Tools --> Web Capture --> Open Web Page. On this dialogue box, click on Conversion Settings.

The first tab of the Conversion Settings, General allows you to set options on the PDF structure. It is not recommended that you change anything in the Content-Type Specific Settings unless you are familiar with file types.

Beneath the list of file types are several checkboxes. Checking Create Bookmarks to New Content will create bookmarks, which resemble in form and function a table of contents. This option is checked by default; it is recommended you leave it that way. Add PDF Tags is recommended only for people who are planning to reformat their PDFs for other specialized viewers. Put Headers and Footers on New Pages will add a header and footer to each captured page with the web page title, the page URL, and the time and date the page was downloaded. If you check Save Refresh Commands, you will be able to open this document later and have Acrobat search the website again to update the contents of the pages so that they match the current website (for instance, if you downloaded a news site, and wanted to capture the current list of news instead of the list you downloaded last week).

The second tab, Page Layout allows you to control the layout and printing options for your document. You can choose the paper size, adjust the margins and the orientation of the page. Since web pages are often larger or in a different format from a normal piece of paper, this tab also allows you to control the scaling: you can check Scale Wide Contents to Fit Page in order to ensure that a captured web page does not extend beyond the boundaries of a printed page, and then define when Acrobat should switch from a portrait orientation to a landscape orientation with the Auto-Switch to Landscape If Contents Smaller Than box.

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