Frequently Asked Question

After research, we found a web service - PDFmyURL - that would create a PDF for each URL we provided. The form of the PDF was excellent for our purpose, and very much like the Print to PDF format produced by Google Chrome. This facility preserved all links - both internal and external - in the process, and rendered only the main content area of the page, and not the header, footer, menus, or sidebars.

PDFmyURL had some additional capabilities that we explored using - such as combining multiple, related pages into a single PDF document. But we found that the post production editing of this document would have required more effort than we had resources available.

However, we did not have a list of all the pages in our Encompass website. We then captured a few pages with lots of menu links as HTML and ran an extract script to build a table of Page ID and Content Name. By performing this process recursively, we had identified about 80% of the pages in our website in a few days.

We had been asking for an Inventor of Page ID, and Title for all of our web pages for several weeks, and ultimately received a list that identified 435 pages. It would have been preferable to have this list earlier in the process, but it was certainly welcome when we got it.

PDFmyURL did the major work of creating the hundreds of PDFs we needed for the new site. The remaining step was to replace Encompass links with links to our new domain.

[DES 5-3-2024]