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mnelson4 / printmyblog

WordPress Plugin that simplifies printing your entire blog
GNU General Public License v3.0
16 stars 6 forks source link

printmyblog doesn't seem to work on my website #1

Closed Cheonhaka closed 5 years ago

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

When I try to print, I get a single page that says "Printout of https://brooksidepress.org/cartmell, generated on December 21, 2018 using "Print My Blog" plugin. " None of the other several hundred pages on the site are printed.

I just downloaded it and installed it a few minutes ago.

Website: https://brooksidepress.org/cartmell

MacOS Mojave 10.14.1 Chrome and Firefox both gave the same results.

I'd really like this to work. Can you help?

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Hi @Cheonhaka, I'm sorry you got a whole lot of nothing! That must have been pretty disappointing.

But thanks for reaching out, and providing details, hopefully I can help...

Print my blog, currently, only works with posts, not pages or other custom post types. Are all your pages custom post types? Or just regular pages?

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

No posts...only pages and images. That likely explains the problem. Oh well, thanks for trying.

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 2:59 PM Mike Nelson notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @Cheonhaka https://github.com/Cheonhaka, I'm sorry you got a whole lot of nothing! That must have been pretty disappointing.

But thanks for reaching out, and providing details, hopefully I can help...

Print my blog, currently, only works with posts, not pages or other custom post types. Are all your pages custom post types? Or just regular pages?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/issues/1#issuecomment-449497010, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Ar7E_faziCBTKI6s8oXgOFZByDtccNLjks5u7UvKgaJpZM4Ze_Ix .

-- Mike Hughey MD

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

I'll take this as a vote to support pages then! Are you wanting to print all pages from your site? Or just those in a certain category? And how would you like them ordered? I'll try to update this thread if I get around to adding this feature, but in the meantime you might want to try https://wordpress.org/plugins/anthologize/ (free plugin, but might choke if you have lots of pages) or https://www.blog2print.com/ (not free, but seems to work pretty well).

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

The website is a collection of all the wartime letters my Uncle Tom wrote (several hundred) from 1943 up until he was shot down and killed at the end of the war. It is an archive of his pilot training and includes loads of pictures. It was my intention to take the website and generate a pdf that would include basically every page (at the end of each page, a pdf page break would be generated). The letters (and Wordpress pages) are organized linearly, in chronologic order. In addition, I have some other pages (people, places and things) that are more like appendices to the main thread.

While I do have some categories assigned, I use them only for labeling purposes and they are not used structurally.

Thanks for thinking about this. If you able to add pages to your plugin, that would be great. If not, I appreciate your references to the other possibilities. I had seen blog2print, and for what I had in mind, it would cost $10.00, a modest fee I'm willing to pay. Free would be even better, but I have so many pages I'm suspicious that Anthology wouldn't be able to handle it.

Best wishes, Mike

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:07 PM Mike Nelson notifications@github.com wrote:

I'll take this as a vote to support pages then! Are you wanting to print all pages from your site? Or just those in a certain category? And how would you like them ordered? I'll try to update this thread if I get around to adding this feature, but in the meantime you might want to try https://wordpress.org/plugins/anthologize/ (free plugin, but might choke if you have lots of pages) or https://www.blog2print.com/ (not free, but seems to work pretty well).

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/issues/1#issuecomment-449498635, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Ar7E_ckKaFEo3a8F7e8QYBJLQPj8Is4Wks5u7U2VgaJpZM4Ze_Ix .

-- Mike Hughey MD

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

ok great thanks for the context. And thanks also for sharing your uncle's history, that's a really neat project. I just noticed pages have an "order", but usually don't have a date associated with them. So when I get around to adding this feature, I think the pages would just appear in the same order as they came in the WordPress admin. Anyways, I'll let you know here when I get this done.

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

FYI @Cheonhaka I was wild and took an hour to add support for pages. You can download that version of the plugin here.

The main trouble with it is ordering though. It currently orders by the "order" page attribute, but doesn't take hierarchy into account. Please let me know how well that works in your case.

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

Mike - Thanks for your work on this. I tried it out this morning, and this is what I discovered.

  1. It works OK in general (see the output here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rv-UrWNp_1IbVCu0reHeHcphchUzQX0T/view?usp=sharing
  2. It does not print the page titles, only the content of the pages. That's unfortunate for me because the page titles contain the dates and location of each page. It would be great if you could figure out a way to have the page title print along with the content of each page.
  3. The order of pages is all messed up. This, I think, is because the online order is established first by hierarchy(parents and children) and then by numbered sequence. With some parents (People, Places and Things) there is no numbered sequence, and the individual pages are listed in alphabetical order. All of this is on the website. But in your pdf, other than the home page being first, I can't determine exactly how the pages are being ordered. One thought is that the "Index" page lists every page on the website, using the [List-Pages] shortcode plugin. If your plugin were to key off of that output, the pages would be correctly ordered.
  4. Even without any changes, your plugin for pages is hugely helpful to me. At least all of the content is in the pdf. I can rearrange the content as needed (with a lot of work) to create manually a new pdf that would be in the correct order. This would be easier still if each page included the title of the page. Thanks again for your time. Mike
mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Thanks for taking it for a spin and documenting how it went.

It does not print the page titles, only the content of the pages.

That's probably an issue with your theme's print styles, as I see them. What theme do you use?

I'll work on getting the order to work hierarchically...

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Ok @Cheonhaka I attempted to add hierarchical ordering. I also added some styling that should force headers to show. (Although I'm currently at a bit of a loss for why they didn't appear for you, when I visit your site's blog-printing-page, I see the headers).

Please re-download the plugin (I'm tentatively calling this version 1.2.0).

If your headers still don't display, please tell me how you're creating the pdf.

:crossed_fingers:

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

I'm using the Twenty Fourteen theme, although if you have any theme you think would work better for printing page titles, let me know and I'll give it a try.

example page In this example, the header is the top blue background jpg with the title of the blog. Underneath the header is the menu bar. Neither the header nor the menu bar is printed with printmyblog. The title of this page is "April 8, 1944, Gila Bend, Arizona. This is not being printed. The "FROM TOM CARTMELL TO ELAINE AND STANLEY HUGHEY" is a category identifier for the page, and it is not being printed. The 3D box starting "Tom is attached..." IS getting printed with each page. The text content and images are being printed, and their formatting is preserved. Not all pages are being printed. eg https://brooksidepress.org/cartmell/things/lockheed-p-38-lightning/ is one in which I searched the pdf for different parts of the text body, and never found it.

I downloaded your new tentative v 1.2.0 and tried it by following your setup instructions. I removed the two earlier versions and then added 1.2.0 and activated it. setup options I set these options, and then clicked on "Prepare Print Page." Time passed. I was able to download a pdf which you can access here (over 200 MB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eA1K67zp1kiEUCIoPyxj7InAoxUkSm-k/view?usp=sharing Then I click "Print Now" and the pdf is produced.

It looks like it contains most of everything in the blog. It is more in hierarchical order than before, but still has some odd placements that I can't explain. eg a series of letters, in correct order, and then the insertion of a person page, or thing page, out of sequence.

Thank you again for your working to make this usable for me. I know you have other things your probably supposed to be doing. If it gets to be too time-consuming to make this work, I'll understand.

Mike

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

The title of this page is "April 8, 1944, Gila Bend, Arizona. This is not being printed.

I found the issue that was causing this. It only happened in Chrome (which is why I wasn't seeing it- I was using Firefox). I made a fix to version 1.2.0 that fixes it for Google Chrome.

The "FROM TOM CARTMELL TO ELAINE AND STANLEY HUGHEY" is a category identifier for the page, and it is not being printed.

I wondered if anyone would want to show categories etc. So thanks for confirming that! I just added some code to show categories, taxonomies, etc. (Not in exactly the same way as in your theme, but it's usable.)

Neither the header nor the menu bar is printed with printmyblog.

Just to clarify, that's intentional. Usually the header and menu isn't well-suited for a printed version of the site, so it seems best to leave that out.

Not all pages are being printed. eg brooksidepress.org/cartmell/things/lockheed-p-38-lightning is one in which I searched the pdf for different parts of the text body, and never found it.

Weird, I'll look into that next.

. It is more in hierarchical order than before, but still has some odd placements that I can't explain. eg a series of letters, in correct order, and then the insertion of a person page, or thing page, out of sequence.

I'll look into that next, too. But if you have an example handy that would be helpful in debugging it.

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Yeah lockheed-p-38-lightning is missing, so are most of the children of "things" (although not all of them, "Gosport tube" is in there. Also, the order is really weird... right after "things" is one of the places. So work in progress...

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

for debugging, the example missing page "Lockheed P-38 Lightning" has ID 3504 and parent ID 57. It's been missing from 2 print-pages (none of the exports had any requests explicitly fail by returning 500 or anything or a timeout), but there is some randomness in the ordering (eg in one print page had "Bill DeMoulin" after "Things", whereas another had "Scott Field, Illinois"). I think the randomness in order is due to requests not being sent synchronously (despite requesting they be synchronous). I'm not sure why some pages are missing yet though...

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

Anything I can do to help? Mike

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 4:21 PM Mike Nelson notifications@github.com wrote:

for debugging, the example missing page "Lockheed P-38 Lightning" has ID 3504 and parent ID 57. It's been missing from 2 print-pages (none of the exports had any requests explicitly fail by returning 500 or anything or a timeout), but there is some randomness in the ordering (eg in one print page had "Bill DeMoulin" after "Things", whereas another had "Scott Field, Illinois"). I think the randomness in order is due to requests not being sent synchronously (despite requesting they be synchronous). I'm not sure why some pages are missing yet though...

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/mnelson4/printmyblog/issues/1#issuecomment-450241260, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Ar7E_WtrhawOvfuSv4tdf9Pjed9WFCWHks5u9UfOgaJpZM4Ze_Ix .

-- Mike Hughey MD

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Thanks. I just updated the branch with an attempted fix. So you could update the branch and try again. It should work quite a bit faster, and I'm crossing my fingers they'll now be in the right order and not be missing some pages.

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Hmm i found a way to test it on your site without needing you to update etc. Unfortunately I'm there are still some missing posts and the order is still strange. I'll need to investigate some more what's going on.

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

I installed your latest fix and gave it a try. When I printed it with Chrome, the pages still did not list the page title, although the page category was listed. But I noticed two other problems: 1) there were many instances in which a photograph embedded on a page was not shown, although the photograph caption was. 2) There were many instances of duplicate pages. For example, the home page is printed sequentially 6 times before any other content appears. Here is the pdf (#3) from this Chrome printing: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TMtGbSxnp29j8oAAdNkaKv2v7m9RlZAZ

Then, I tried it using Firefox and found that the page titles printed just fine, but the same problem with missing images and duplicate pages was present. Two other duplicate examples include "DOROTHY STOUTZENBERG" (4 duplicates) and "ROSE BREWER". Here's the printout from Firefox (4): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WxnzRMCO8qfYKDfHslU4--RO7QUb22iR

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Thanks @Cheonhaka. I believe I have a fix for the Chrome header issues again. Also, I made a change that resolved that strange ordering and duplicates. I'm not sure why the images aren't showing though. I'm getting inconsistent 403 errors from your site when requesting images (eg https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N2oamj_CfGM70gWzeZxxgv5jMMPPDGmt/view). I suspect there's some security plugin or server firewall that's limiting how many images can be served. Are you aware of a security plugin or something that might be causing this? (If not, I may need to investigate slowing down how quickly the page renders)

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Actually I updated the branch again to slow it down, which seems to cause a lot fewer images to not load. If you find any images are missing again we can slow it down some more.

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

This latest change worked very well.

I've posted the resulting pdf's from Chrome ( https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qw4_0CJ_UDmGRWrglIqJc4-evWFXrjf8 ) and Firefox ( https://drive.google.com/open?id=16Yupzl8sEn4y3ZR-FKGWupPC30qeZ1bs ).

Thanks again for spending your time resolving these issues. I appreciate it. Mike

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Great! Well thanks for testing it. We're getting there!

Regarding ordering: yes it's just ordering by the page's order right now, but I made an update so that if the order matches, we fall back to alphabetical order of the page's title. If that doesn't resolve your ordering issue please point me to which pages are in a different order than what's expected.

Regarding page breaks, yeah it seems I broke that somewhere on this branch, but just pushed an update to fix that.

Also regarding the missing image, I added an option to the print setup page so you can either speed up or slow down how quickly the pages are rendered (it defaults to half a second per page, but some folks might want to increase or decrease that). So maybe that will be of some help.

Cheonhaka commented 5 years ago

Just tested your latest edition and it is all working fine. I didn't change the default timing at all. If I can figure out how to do it, I'm going to write a glowing review of your plugin. Thank you. Mike

mnelson4 commented 5 years ago

Great thank you! I just updated the version https://wordpress.org/plugins/print-my-blog/ to be 1.2.0, which includes all this work for printing pages. :bowing_man: And all the best with preserving your uncle's memories!