A reader wants to convert some photo editing tutorials that were contained within e-mails to PDFs and she’s frustrated. The content of the emails were not sent as email attachments that could be downloaded to a folder in the PC. They’re actually contained within the e-mails. She writes: “I have never found a way to get them out of Yahoo email so I could create a PDF file to put in my iPad and use along side my PC in order to follow steps within the tutorial on an image. There are a lot of these tutorials and I think it’s wrong of Yahoo to keep them captive and not allow them to be imported into the PC where they can be saved/used as required to learn the edit process.”
Yahoo isn’t holding your information captive. It’s just that to convert the information to PDFs, you need to get it onto your PC where a program can convert the files. Right now the information is stored on the Yahoo! mail servers as a message.
You need to get the information on to your PC in order to convert it to a PDF. Probably the simplest way is just to copy and paste the contents of the e-mails into a Word document. Then arrange it a bit for neatness and save it as a PDF.
You could use another word processor as well. Open up the e-mail tutorial in Yahoo! Mail and highlight the content you wish to save. I’m using an issue of WorldStart’s Tech Tips Daily as an example.
You can either press the Ctrl key + C to copy or right-click and select “copy” from the drop-down menu.
Then open a new Word document and press Ctrl + V to paste the contents into the document.
Look over the document and make sure everything pasted where you want it. If it looks good, click the File tab and choose Save As.
When the window below opens, click the the drop-down menu beside Save as type.
Choose PDF fro the options available.
That document is now available as a PDF.
You could also just open those Yahoo! Mail messages on your iPad and read the tutorials, but you’ll probably want to look at other options for archiving the material. You could get an e-mail client like Outlook and download copies of those e-mails to your PC.
But that might not always guarantee you have access to the full tutorial. Many times, images are not actually in the e-mails. That would make them much too large. Rather, they are HTML links that display as images. But should those posted images ever be taken off the server, they would disappear from your e-mail as well.
If you don’t have Word, you could always follow the same procedure and save the information as a document in a program like Open Office and then go to a site that allows you to convert documents to PDFs.
~ Cynthia
An easier option is installing a program like CutePDF writer. Then all you have to do is use Yahoo’s “Print” option, but choosing “CutePDF” as the “printer” in the print dialogue box. That will save it as a PDF instead of printing on paper.