dreamkatcha
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My pleasure. Yep, definitely, that sounds perfect. I think if anyone struggles with comprehending that, they may well be speakers of English as a foreign language, and there’s no accounting for that.
Presenting the proposed output as above may be a fun challenge regardless if you can find the time at some point. Extra refinement can’t hurt.
Yep, I’d love to, thanks. Just tested it out on the whole blog at once and it managed to generate all the content with no problems at all using 999 as the timeout setting (quick too!), though when I came to print to PDF, the mini-preview failed. Not a big deal really – I was throwing about 5.5k worth of pages at it including thousands of pictures. If I was doing it for real I’d split it up like last time to be kinder to the plugin.
I didn’t use the show filters option, but the wording above sounds fine to me. On the fine-tuning/settings page itself, looking again I’m not so sure about the ‘or’ word as it possibly introduces confusion/doubt? It seems to suggest that the outcome might be different depending on circumstances, whereas you’d hope the result would always be uniform. If you swapped ‘or’ with ‘and’ I think it sounds more certain. As before though, maybe it’s just me. People of all nationalities will be reading this text and may interpret it differently.
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
Ah, it’s not just me then. Yep, I think option 1 would work with those clearer descriptions. That’s consistent for both ends of the range so should be easy for people to get their head around without making any assumptions.
Another idea I had before reading your post (probably not necessary now) was to have the date selection options with minimal explanation e.g. before and after. Then when you make your choices it spits out a summary of what will be included if you proceed with those settings. You’d then have to confirm that this is what you want or make an adjustment before finally pressing submit.
Like I said, that’s probably over-engineering it. If people are on the same page from the outset it shouldn’t be necessary to spell it out any further.
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
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.
Update: I tested the same link in Chrome. It generated the preview OK, but the PDF is missing a tonne of pictures.
Excellent, thanks. Just tried again and the ‘private’ has vanished as you say. I also re-generated the content to go between the pages with the above issue and this time the font size matches the prologue and epilogue font, which is great news.
When I had the font size problem earlier I was using Chrome – I fell out with Firefox ages ago. I’ve since installed Brave, not to try and workaround this issue, just because I like it and was going to anyway. So Brave works as intended, I’m not sure if Chrome now would too following the release of new PMB plugin.
So that’s book 1’s content done in one fell swoop. Phew! Got there in the end, thanks. I’ve been working on fixing everything up since October in readiness for this revamp. Grammarly checks, cleaning up pics, replacing others etc.
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” against a grey background where the mini PDF representation would be. I can try printing in two separate segments, but I thought it was worth mentioning all the same.
Here’s an example URL (this one previews and prints fine actually – half the content of book 2)…
The Amiga cursor wasn’t my idea, but I agree, it’s a nice novelty tweak. ??
Hmmm, it looks like the problem lies somewhere in the second segment of articles because I keep getting the ‘preview failed’ error despite chopping the content in half. Here’s the problematic link…
This is quite a bit smaller than the total content of my first book which printed in one go, so it’s not purely a size issue.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by dreamkatcha.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by dreamkatcha.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by dreamkatcha.
No problem, happy to help.
The private post option is new to me. I’ve never had a use for it until now and likely won’t again. It seems odd to post private articles to the WWW.
The WordPress blog is at https://www.everythingamiga.com, but I haven’t replaced the PDF books yet.
The prologue and epilogue use what I’d call a normal/reasonable font size. It’s the rest of the content that’s gone micro. It seems to be related to how much you generate in one go – if I output single articles everything looks fine. I recall the old version having this issue too, but I got around it by printing to PDF in smaller segments. I think I did it three months worth of posts at a time.
Here are some sample images…
https://www.everythingamiga.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ea-prologue-sample.png
https://www.everythingamiga.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ea-article-sample.pngLOL. Yes, separate threads would make sense. I’ll remember that in future.
Brilliant, thanks very much for continuing to improve this fantastic plugin, it’s much appreciated. ??
I’ve finally got round to regenerating my first book using the current version of Print My Blog and 99% of it went according to plan.
I created a prologue and epilogue in WordPress that I didn’t intend to publicly publish. PMB doesn’t appear to be able to include these if they’re saved as drafts, and if you publish them as private posts to make them visible to the plugin, PMB precedes the title in the output with ‘Private:’. It would be nice if there was an option to remove that or process drafts as normal.
The only other issue I had relates to the font size. When I created the PDFs for my prologue and epilogue the font was a decent legible size, but when printing all the content as one monster PDF to go in between, somehow the font size was roughly halved, making it difficult to read without zooming in. I kept this the same in the fine-tuning settings before starting so that wouldn’t explain it unfortunately.
No problem at all. Credit where it’s due – it’s always nice to find an app, plugin or whatever that does what it claims to do and does it well.
If I generated a single PDF from all my articles it would likely be a 2GB monstrosity because I’ve included tonnes of movie screengrabs and whatnot. I wouldn’t expect Print My Blog/Chrome to be able to handle that in one go, but it would be an interesting test just to find out.
As it is, fours years of content are split across two books with months-worth of more recent articles not yet included. Last time I did this I used a different plugin to generate individual per-post PDFs and then stitched it all together later along with a separate cover and prologue. It worked out OK, although it was a messy procedure and the formatting/font smoothing could have been better. I remember having to ensure every picture was a minimum width, otherwise it wouldn’t appear central on the page and this meant removing a lot of portrait mode images. I gave up on including anything ‘complicated’ like flowing/inline text since no converter I tried could cope with that.
When I revamp my books using Print My Blog I think I’ll work with 3 or 6 month chunks so I don’t break anything. It would be interesting to find out if it can handle more creative formatting, but I don’t feel like changing everything back the way it was to experiment with this, so maybe I’ll just do some spot tests with new posts.
Very nice, thanks! That’s done the trick, no more stray inserted words and it seems to run much faster.
I really love the formatting of the PDFs this generates. The layout is clean and smooth and it maintains my text indentation, styles, colours and centralised pictures.
Hi,
Thanks for getting back to me, though I’m really not sure what you mean. I only need the post title and content including pictures, which is exactly what the plugin produced except for that additional orphan word ‘posts’ at the top.
Forum: Themes and Templates
In reply to: [ColorMag] ColorMag theme image caption text alignmentHuh? If you search the source code of the first link you’ll see three references to ‘caption’ and there’s 23 references in the 2nd link.
Forum: Themes and Templates
In reply to: [ColorMag] ColorMag theme image caption text alignmentSure, thanks for getting back to me. Here’s one of my oldest posts where the wonky alignment issue occurs (check out the last two pics, the others don’t have caption text).
These ones were originally imported from Blogger in case that’s relevant. Looking at the HTML code though it seems to be standard and very simple, and the code used to insert images with captions is identical.
Now here’s my latest article that was created in WordPress from the start. The caption text alignment in this one ignores any attempts to centre it too, but it’s correct if left alignment was the aim.
No need for screenshots really. A good example here is the fourth pic down (the one of Sly Stallone).
Please excuse the ultra nerdiness. ??