Inserting the word ‘posts’ into PDFs

this time the font size matches the prologue and epilogue font,

Ya that’s good news, although it’s a mystery why that was happening in the first place, as I didn’t make any changes aimed at fixing that yet. Please let me know if it happens again.

I tried to re-generate book 2’s content which includes quite a few more articles. It displayed them all in one HTML page OK, but then failed when I pressed the print to PDF button. I just got the message “preview failed”…

That’s using Brave browser?

I tested the same link in Chrome. It generated the preview OK, but the PDF is missing a tonne of pictures.

Can you point out some of the pictures that are missing? Have you tried doubling the the “post rendering time”? See this
this FAQ for details on how to do that.

Yes, the preview failed in Brave. I knew that the time-out extension setting is available, but didn’t try it after I managed to get all the pictures to display properly with Chrome thinking that once they’re on the page the script has done its job correctly pulling them from the server.

Anyway, I gave it a go now setting the time-out to 999 and managed to get the plugin to display all pictures in both browsers, but still can’t print due to the print preview error that appears within the print dialogue menu.

What’s different in this segment of posts is that I’m using a script that compiles links to all of my articles for navigation purposes. This creates an ordinary post listing the articles by name with optional tags and other details, all on a single page. Maybe if I try and exclude this I might get different results.

OH I see, so the images all get loaded onto the print page, but when you create the PDF in Chrome tons of images are missing. That is weird. Also unfortunately that sounds like a limitation in Chrome (although it’s possible Print My Blog could do something to give Chrome less work to do.)

I’ve downloaded Brave and given it a test drive.

I’ve tried generating a PDF using that link with Brave and Firefox (with the “Print to PDF” extension), and yes I see there are missing images (especially in the second half of the PDF). That’s the first time I’ve seen this.

The PDF generated by Brave was 100 MB, the PDF generated by Firefox’s Print to PDF extension was 500MB, and may have included more images.

I then changed the URL you gave me to instead only show “small” images, and IT WORKED with Firefox (didn’t try Brave, but I bet it would too). All the images appeared, albeit smaller ones. What was especially bizarre was that the PDF, with small images, was 800MB. I think that was because it actually downloaded all the images this time.

THEN, to see what changed, I again used the link you provided (with full-size images) and THIS TIME it worked (with Firefox again). The PDF was again about 800MB. Weird stuff.

I then again tried Brave, and the PDF was 700MB. So it seems each attempt to create the PDF is failing usually failing loading the images at some point.

Do the PDFs have different filesizes if you download them repeatedly like I did?

I suspect its the browser or the webserver that is choking at some point dealing with so many images. I have an idea that might help but it won’t be too easy of a fix…

It is indeed odd. I’m starting to think it has a lot to do with caching since if you repeat the process a few times you get there in the end. My theory is that the browser downloads as much as it can cope with the first time, then fills in any gaps on the second run, adding those to the already local stash. When you finally generate the finished article it’s complete. I hope!

A few days ago I upgraded my system to include 40gb of RAM so if it’s still struggling, Chrome et al need to go in the bin. ??

1080p video editing is still a bit choppy which is disappointing… but I digress.

What I was finding is that missing pictures would appear towards the end (not appear I mean), suggesting it’s a sequential system. If I can see the final pics and then scan backwards to check if the earlier pictures are there too, they do seem to be. I can’t face checking all 3000 and something pages, but this seems to be the case.

What the plugin really needs is a final report to let you know how successful it’s been to eliminate any guesswork or manual checking. Not sure how feasible that would be since part of the task is taken care of by the browser so that would need to feedback somehow.

I wonder if there’s any such thing as a PDF tester? Something that would check the integrity of the finished product? It would need to know what your intentions were to begin with and that may require mind reading!

Yes, I was receiving different sized PDFs after each attempt, reflecting the number of pics included, so at least that’s logical. I never tried using smaller images since that’s not what I’d like in the final version.

Anyway, both new revisions are online. Phew!

https://www.everythingamiga.com/2017/11/beginning-book-lot-like-christmas-amigas-evry-store.html

https://www.everythingamiga.com/2018/08/dreamkatcha-articles-compilation-book-part-two-has-landed.html

Anyway, both new revisions are online. Phew!

??????

What I was finding is that missing pictures would appear towards the end (not appear I mean), suggesting it’s a sequential system.

Yeah from scanning over the files I generated, that does seem to be the case. I think I will add a FAQ for this, and the code can manually check for PDFs with lots of images (I’d say over a few hundred.) I’ll suggest checking that the last few pictures loaded ok in the PDF.

Yeah I’m really NOT in love with how this has worked out here. It’s almost comical how weird this is. But analyzing the generated PDFs is above my pay grade currently…

Thanks for providing links to your finished products!

Oh and I’ve downloaded and looked at one of the PDf books you produced (“Throw it to the ducks”) and it was really funny. I see the foreward and opposite-of-forward (backward, I should get the terms sorted out…). How did you end up adding the full-image cover page?
Good job! You’re the first I’ve heard of to make their blog-to-book PDF available for download like that.

Oh well, everything is a work in progress and much of it you won’t be able to control anyway since it relies so heavily on the user’s browser, which could be one of dozens of different varieties.

The most thorough test is probably releasing PDFs to the people you’d hope would be interested in reading them and then request that they report any problems. That would likely flag up issues the author wouldn’t be aware of otherwise.

Thanks, glad you like them. ?? The humour is quite niche so it sounds like you fall into the right catchment group and would understand all the geeky references from the era I grew up in. It must be a bit of a head-scratcher for non-gamers or those of a different generation.

Interesting. So are other people mainly keeping these PDF books for their own archival purposes? I’d have thought the best use for this would be to make offline/portable reading easier and less cluttered for visitors. The keepsake/archive element is an added bonus that automatically follows. If I had to suddenly recreate the entire site and didn’t have an easy way to re-import it, a good alternative would be to just plonk down the PDF somewhere and say there you go, done. Download it if you like. ??

Any backup you make of a WordPress blog is naturally in that format. Sometime in the future, you might decide not to use it, or the decision could be taken out of your hands for whatever reason. Then things can get complicated if you want to repurpose the content and there’s a tonne of it. That’s one reason I’m not keen on things like proprietary WP code that breaks portability conventions.

I designed the cover entirely in an image editor using the exact dimensions I’d need for the PDF (I think I decided on A4 and then worked out what that equates to in pixels). After that it’s really easy – you can create a new document in a Word processor using the same dimensions, insert the pic to fill the entire page and then print to PDF.

An even easier option is to use an online image to PDF conversion service. Some ruin the quality because they don’t think that’s important (???) so you have to experiment with different tools. One really good one I know of is https://www.imagetopdf.com