Inserting the word ‘posts’ into PDFs

Hi @dreamkatcha, I see you’ve UNchecked all the settings under “Post Content to Print” and saw all that’s left is where it says the post type… Yeah, that’s no good is it. Really that should be part of the “Filters used” option, come to think of it.
I’ll try to add that ASAP.

Yeah I’ve thought about adding a way to save defaults, so I’ll take your input as an upvote! But I had thought to put that in the premium version. I’ve created an issue in GitHub for this. You can follow that in case this topic gets closed automatically before that happens.

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.

No worries @dreamkatcha.
I’m working on a new version that fixes this, (and adds the option to add “print” buttons onto posts). If you like you can try it by:
1. Deactivating the version of Print My Blog that’s currently running on your site (preferably try this new version on a test site, as it likely still has bugs)
2. download the new version here
3. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard, then click plugins, then “add new”, then “upload” and upload the zip file you just downloaded
4. Try printing your blog again. (I think you’re unchecking all the options under “Header Content to Print”, which is fine.)
Please let me know if you have any issues. If it all works OK, I hope to release that version to www.ads-software.com this week.

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.

Awesome thanks for giving it a try. I’ve got a bit more tidying up to do on that version before releasing it, but it should be ready in the next few days.
In the meantime, if you could leave a nice review that would much appreciated!
(And I haven’t forgotten about saving settings, although that will take quite a bit longer.)

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.

Print My Blog would eat a 2GB monstrosity for breakfast! …ok, actually it might work. One user made a PDF with over 3000 pages, and I think I’ve seen a PDF several GBs large. But ya, you can hear the computer struggling working with files that big.

FYI I’m holding off releasing the version you tested, as I’m wanting to improve the user experience with the new frontend print buttons first. I’m hoping to release next week.

Version 2.0.0 includes removes “posts” from the top of the page if you’ve decided to not show the filters in the header content. And I have a GitHub issue for tracking the feature request to save printout settings.

Thanks for the feedback @dreamkatcha !

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.

Hi again @dreamkatcha, thanks for the feedback.
Ya I suppose using private posts is a way smart way to add a prologue and epilogue. But I agree the “private:” is generally annoying (that also happens when viewing those posts/pages on your website, which, in my opinion, is also annoying.) I’ll see what I can do about removing that.
Regarding the font size, that will take some debbugging. Can you point me to your site? And is it just the prologue and epilogue with the tiny font or is it the entire printout? Screenshots could also help.
(Lastly, it would probably be good to create separate support topics for each of your questions, both for ease of searching and so, later on, we can have the satisfaction of marking them as resolved multiple times!??)

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.png

LOL. Yes, separate threads would make sense. I’ll remember that in future.

Hey @dreamkatcha I just released version 2.1.2 which removes “Private:” (and “Protected:”) from post titles in Print My Blog…
And I’ve been looking into the issue with the small font size and haven’t yet seen it on your site.
Are you using Firefox and the “Print to PDF” extension? Or Chrome?
Also, could you provide a link to the page where you’re seeing it? (ie, you can actually copy the URL of the print page, and anyone who clicks it and try to generate the exact same printout.) Eg I tried https://www.everythingamiga.com/?post-type=post&order-date=asc&order-menu=asc&include-private-posts=1&dates%5Bafter%5D=2018-06-05&dates%5Bbefore%5D&show_site_title=1&show_site_tagline=1&show_site_url=1&show_filters=1&show_date_printed=1&show_credit=1&show_title=1&show_date=1&show_categories=1&show_featured_image=1&show_content=1&post-page-break=on&columns=1&font-size=normal&image-size=medium&links=include&rendering-wait=200&print-my-blog=1&format=print and used Firefox’ “Print to PDF” extension and the font size looked good to me.

By the way, the old-school cursor on your site is pretty fun.??

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)…

https://www.everythingamiga.com/?post-type=post&order-date=asc&order-menu=asc&include-private-posts=1&pmb-author=7&dates%5Bafter%5D=2017-11-26&dates%5Bbefore%5D=2018-12-31&show_title=1&show_content=1&post-page-break=on&columns=1&font-size=normal&image-size=full&links=include&rendering-wait=200&print-my-blog=1&format=pdf

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…

https://www.everythingamiga.com/?post-type=post&order-date=asc&order-menu=asc&include-private-posts=1&pmb-author=7&dates%5Bafter%5D=2018-12-31&dates%5Bbefore%5D=2019-12-31&show_title=1&show_content=1&post-page-break=on&columns=1&font-size=normal&image-size=full&links=include&rendering-wait=200&print-my-blog=1&format=pdf

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.

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