My wife always goes to the store, sees something she likes at the price she wants, and then comes home to think about it. A few hours or days later, the item is always gone.

I constantly tell her to buy it then and there, but she is a very cautious person--a good trait.

Similarly, I am an avid news reader. I read all sorts of things and can whip through stories like mad across dozens of news and other outlets and topics. The only problem is, my academic background gets in the way. I participate in a couple of lists and like to cite my sources when making points. Going back and trying to google exact articles doesn't work. So, any article that I like or has an interesting premise or just feels interesting, I'll print to PDF and store in a document cache on my local computer. I have Acrobat9 professional, so every once in a while I'll go back batch OCR the whole archive. Sometimes I'll sort it by topic or interest, but basically it's my own little r&d library. Everything from patents.google.com to software research to current events, to science, and yes, even, nasty politics.

Here's my stupid idea of the day, there are a lot of read later, bookmarklet, social reading/sharing sites out there, but they typically don't archive in exact form what you saw/read, index it for personal search, and show the content in situ. All my bookmarks across all my browsers over the years all go bad. Content vendors try using permalinks, but still, it isn't the same thing and searching bookmarks is more about sites than content.

What if there was a service that when you found something you liked, it automatically stored the Web2pdf exact image on your dropbox folder and also indexed the content for keywords and concepts (and sentiment) such that you have your own little library. It'd be just doing what I do now and putting it into cloud storage and cloud indexing. I would always be able to cite any article I wanted, download the pdf, use the image thumbnail, link to exact quotes or paragraphs inside the article...whatever...even share them. It'd be my own little R&D service, but more importantly, taking one more task off of my desktop.

Obviously I can move my local PDF archive to my dropbox area, but it's not quite the same thing.

Anwyas, the reason I thought of this is that Firefox 15.0 and the previous 7 versions broke my Adobe print to PDF printer, so there are some javascript heavy Web pages, mostly news orgs, that give errors upon printing that are caused by some combination of Noscript and Firefox. Sometimes I can get around by switching to IE or Chrome, but they have a whole set of different issues that are even more intractable.

I found this CleanPrint tool and firefox plugin that is worthy of mention. I like this tool, they have a really clever implementation, and I hope they go far. I'll be supporting them as much as I can.

This is awesome.

As an aside, isn't it sad in 2012 that the Web is finally killing Flash but PDF seems here to stay?