Epub printing

Glad you enjoyed my blog’s subtitle ??!

Regarding creating epubs: Print My Blog just puts all your blog’s content into a single page, and then leaves it up to your browser, and whatever extensions you may have installed, to print, or convert to PDF, or convert to ePub. So you just need to figure out how to convert a web page into an ePub, then do that on the Print My Blog print-page.

There’s the browser extension dotepub that kinda does that: https://dotepub.com/. But I haven’t gotten it to work very well yet (it only includes the first post, and seems to be missing random headers). I’ve spent an hour this morning trying to get it to work properly but no luck yet. I would think there should be other good options out there for converting a webpage into an ePub. If you find any others please let me know.

And regarding saving to dropbox or google drive: I’m afraid that feature is probably a looong way off. Can you tell me more about how you’d like to use it? Eg, are you wanting to basically create automatic backups of your site in an epub format?

FYI I’ve been in touch with dotepub’s developer, trying to figure out if Print My Blog can work properly with it. He replied with a suggestion which hasn’t worked yet (also, keep in mind his software is also supported by donations, so any help he gives is a gift).

I may end up needing to generate the epub files in my own code, which will be quite a bit more time consuming, and will likely also end up needing to be a premium add-on.

Good news! I have an experimental version of Print My Blog that seems to play nicely with dotEpub for making ePub and mobi files.
@alemarcanob will you have time to try it in the next few days? If so, please respond to let me know, and then try it by:

1. download the updated plugin from GitHub (using this link).
2. Upload it to your WordPress site (preferably a test or staging site) by going to the WordPress dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
3. Deactivate the current version (right now it’s at 1.9.6) and activate the one you just uploaded (currently 1.9.7)
4. Use Print My Blog as normal (Go to Tools -> Print My Blog -> Prepare Print Page)
5. Once the print page is ready, use dotepub (either the browser extension or bookmarklet) to create the epub.

If you’re using the non-immersive mode (which I prefer), it will try to include images, but you’ve probably got too many so it will give you some warnings and will replace the images with links to images. In my opinion that’s probably ok, because if it did include all the images the file would be huge.

Please let me know how it goes.

Hello @mnelson4 !!! Wow!
I just tried it on a test site, it was smooth! I totally loved it…Very easy and fast.. Images were not shown as you said… Original Post has 42 images (Crazy, I know) and 3 youtube videos. No error at all. I tried epub with dotEpub chrome extension (loved the epub version) so clean, it was perfect… And also tried PDF.. it was also very good! If there is something I didn’t like was for PDF version: youtube videos are shown in a white framework. Date and url stamp looks much nicer now, Still get:
(webpage/postnamepos/?type=post&taxonomies%5Btags%5D%5B0%5D=6&dates%5Bafter%5D&dates%5Bbefore%5D&sho….)

Have to say not a big fan the way URL is shown on everypage (but I guess is impossible to remove as everytime a PDF is printed, I get the same URL footer with every tool I know eg, cutepdf) Thanks for this great plugin!! Love it!

Thanks for giving it a try @alemarcanob !
I am just releasing an update which incorporates the changes you tried.

Yes, YouTube videos don’t look very good. I want to replace them with a screenshot (see https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/issues/2). I’ll takr your input as vote to prioritize that!
And you actually can remove the URL from the PDFs. I showed how to with Firefox and the print to pdf extension here: https://youtu.be/ekwg2a1FPV0

Hello @mnelson4 !! The update is great! very intuitive! Images on PDF are excelent! Thanks for the firefox hack…! Cool plugin! ??

Thanks for the feedback @alemarcanob! If you’d like to leave a review too that would be appreciated.

FYI @alemarcanob, I made some progress on improving how YouTube videos look in printouts. I’d appreciate it if you could test out the version and what you think about how the YouTube videos are shown. You can download it using this link: https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/archive/FET/youtube-thumbnails.zip Once you’ve downloaded it, go to your site (or a test site would be better), then to Plugins, Add New, Upload, and upload the zip file. Then deactivate the current version of Print My Blog (1.11.2) and activate this experimental version (1.12.0).

I’m not sure if you’ll see this. I’d appreciate it if you could let me know in a day or two if you’ll be able to do this. Otherwise I’ll probably just try my best and release it.

FYI version 1.12.0 improves how YouTube videos appear in printouts. I also made a blog post explaining how it works and asking for feedback: https://cmljnelson.blog/2019/09/24/how-print-my-blog-makes-youtube-videos-look-good-when-printed-and-you-can-too/

Great Improvement Michael! Personally I’ve never used QR codes, but maybe some other people do. Keep up the great work!!! Love your plugin is very useful!

Thanks!!!