Add Print, PDF version, and email links

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend to friendSend to friend

Often with a site like this one, where people come to get Drupal help and tutorials, visitors would like to view an article either in a printer friendly format or download it as a PDF. Also at times they may want to email an article to a friend or college who would be interested in reading it. Once again Drupal comes through with a great contributed module to allow us to do this. It is called the Printer, e-mail, and PDF versions module.

To use this module you simply download and install it (if you don’t know how check out our how to install a drupal module tutorial). Once you’ve installed the module you can enable any of the three features you want: PDF version, Printer-Friendly pages, and Send by email. You will also want to navigate to the Site Configuration –> Printer, Email, and PDF versions menus. Here you can do things like set where you want the links to appear and if you want images or text showing, etc.

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Note: Don’t forget to enable anonymous users to see the print, email, and PDF links through the Permissions configuration section if you want everyone to have this functionality.

So far I have just been using the printer friendly version and Send an email to a friend features. I haven’t downloaded and set up the stuff to create PDF files. All and all a very useful feature that is very easy to set up. Its situations like this where you begin to see the true power of a content management system like Drupal!

Comments

Also try addthis.com

As an alternative, we've been using the addthis module in conjuction with a free account from addthis.com, which provides email and print links, and a bunch of other things like Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever. The look is customisable and has the benefit of being more instantly recognisable to your site's visitors.

Of course, the downside for some people will be that you're relying on a third party service to power this functionality.

Thanks for this.

Thanks for taking the time to direct us to such useful modules.