Email receipts, web booking confirmations, screenshots, articles you want to keep — all in different formats, scattered everywhere. PDF them all and your archive becomes uniform and searchable.
Here's how.
Print-to-PDF is universal
Almost every application has Print. Almost every OS turns Print into PDF as a destination. Cmd+P (Mac) or Ctrl+P (Windows), choose 'Save as PDF', name and save.
Use this for: web pages worth keeping, emails worth archiving, documents in non-PDF formats. Five seconds per item.
Phone scans as PDFs
iOS Notes and Files apps both scan paper to PDF. Android's Google Drive scan does the same. Output is a clean, OCR'd PDF ready to file.
Keep your phone as your portable scanner. Capture receipts at the coffee shop, contracts at meetings, anything paper you encounter in the wild.
Browser extensions for one-click web archiving
Extensions like 'Save as PDF' or 'Print Friendly' let you save web pages as PDFs in one click. Useful for articles, reference material, anything you want to read later or archive.
For research-heavy work, this turns the web into a personal PDF library.
Then process via Flint
Once everything is a PDF, your archive becomes uniform. Process via Flint for any cleanup — edit, merge, compress. File in your archive structure.
Uniform format means uniform search, uniform processing, uniform storage. The benefit compounds across thousands of items.
FAQ
Is converting everything to PDF wasteful?
Slight overhead per file, but the benefits (uniformity, searchability, longevity) outweigh it for archival purposes. For ephemeral content, skip PDF; for kept content, convert.
What about emails I want to archive?
Print-to-PDF the email body, save to `/Archive/Emails/<year>/`. Includes attachments inline. The PDF is searchable and survives even if your email provider goes away.
Do PDF screenshots take more space than image screenshots?
Slightly. But they're more useful — searchable text (if OCR'd), uniform format, easier to print or share.
What's the best way to PDF a long web page?
Browser print-to-PDF handles it. For very long pages, some extensions (like Print Friendly) optimise the layout before PDFing.
Uniform archive starts with uniform format. Process your next incoming item in Flint and add it to the system.