Why can't I create PDFs?

Safari on Mac OS Catalina, but same problem with other Mac browsers…

There are a lot of great message threads that I would like to save on disk locally, but I am unable to make a PDF of any that contain more than perhaps two pages worth of messages.

I know the forum software does not load the entire thread at once, and graphics are slow to load. But even when I page down to the bottom of the thread so the whole things should be resident in the browser page, and then Export to PDF and save it, the PDF is blank after a couple of pages.

What’s the root problem, and is there a way to fix it, or some work-around?

This would rank as severely kludgy, but you could use Chrome or Firefox with an auto scroll extension, then just command-shift-5 and do a screen grab.

Doesn’t work like that. Discourse (the software behind the forum) is a web app, the page you see is being created on the fly by Javascript code running in your browser. It fetches post replies as required to render in the visible part of the window, and discards ones that have been scrolled out of view, with some buffering so you can mostly keep scrolling and see the data with minimal delay.

That’s the magic behind the lack of pagination such as we used to see in the old forum software - a given thread looks like it is a single scrollable page, but only the part we can see is there at any given time.

However if you simply use the print command key (ctrl-P or cmd-P) or change the URL by replacing the trailing number with “print”, e.g. change

https://forum.cirruspilots.org/t/dont-do-this-to-your-prop/224337/3

to

https://forum.cirruspilots.org/t/dont-do-this-to-your-prop/224337/print

you will get a print preview that you can save as a PDF. A very long topic might take quite a while to load.

4 Likes

That works perfectly well. Thanks!

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