Selecting Stories for your PDF Newspaper

One question that’s come up a few times about the RSS to PDF Newspaper service is: How do I select the stories to be included in the PDF?

At the moment you can use the service to create a PDF from a single article on a web page or a number of articles listed in a feed. But what if you’re only interested in, say, two of the articles in a feed? Or two articles each appearing on a different site? Well, I’m working on a solution for this but in the meantime there is a fairly simple way to do it: Create a feed with only the content you want to print.

One advantage with using web feeds as input is that you can use many of the existing services built around feeds. One of these services is Instapaper. You can use it save web pages you’d like to read later. The site, in addition to saving and listing these pages for you, produces an RSS feed of everything you’ve saved. So you can use the service to easily mark the pages you’d like to combine into your own personal newspaper and then pass the feed to RSS to PDF Newspaper to have the content pulled into a newspaper. To do this, simply copy the feed URL given to you by Instapaper, paste it into the feed URL box of the RSS to PDF service, check the ‘fetch full text’ option and hit ‘Create PDF’.

The process is actually simpler if you use the bookmarklets provided by both services. I’ve put together a screencast to show how it works:

If you try it, please leave a comment and let me know how it works out for you.