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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

2 issues: parenthesis hyperlinks and page breaks not copied over #175

Open dcisbusy opened 3 years ago

dcisbusy commented 3 years ago

Firstly: awesome plugin - thank you so much!

I have two issues though, one quite time consuming to work around and the other very minor.

  1. I selected to put hyperlinks in parentheses and that's how they appear on the screen, but they don't copy over to any other document. I've tried using Chrome, Firefox, Google Docs and LibreOffice, but no combination works. Instead what I get is a fully functioning hyperlink, instead of the web address in brackets. Current work around is to copy the web address into a footnote and then remove the hyperlink from the text - quite time consuming for 70+ blog posts.

  2. I selected to add a page break after every post, but this doesn't translate over either.

I'd love to know if these get fixed and - depending on price - they are features I'd be happy to pay for.

Many thanks again, David

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Hi David! Thanks for reporting the issue. I’m suspicious that your theme or a plugin is interfering. Can you please share the URL of your website where you’re using Print My Blog? (Please make sure Print My Blog is active, the site is publicly accessible, and if you’re using a security plugin, try to make the WP REST API active for public users.) I lm confident we’ll find a fix that won’t require hours of mental work

dcisbusy commented 3 years ago

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your quick reply. This is the website: https://davidcharles.info/

Is that all you need?

Cheers, d

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Hi David, hopefully. Sorry I won’t be able to look into it until Monday though. If I don’t reply then feel free to ping me again!

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Hey @dcisbusy, good news/bad news! It works fine for me on your site! On this URL, when I created a PDF using either Google Chrome or Firefox's "Print to PDF" the links appear in parentheses ok (screenshot) and each post appears on a new page.

Here's the PDF created from Google Chrome: David Charles.pdf

Am I right? Or am I missing something? If you retry from this URL does it work for you too?

dcisbusy commented 3 years ago

Thanks for looking into this, Mike. I really appreciate it.

I should have been clearer about what I'm trying to do. I'd like to create a book of all my blog posts from 2020, but I need to edit the texts before I publish. So what I was trying to do was copy the text created by your plugin over into an editor.

I was using the HTML option that the plugin offers and it all works perfectly - except for the parentheses and page breaks. The URL you sent also shows the parentheses and page breaks in the browser, but it still won't let me copy them into an editor like Google Docs or LibreOffice.

Hopefully this image shows the problem: everything is highlighted and copies over, keeping the formatting, except for the parentheses.

image

Does that make sense? I end up with a LibreOffice file that looks like this:

image

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions. Thanks so much!

(Side note: After trying with both Firefox and Chrome, in desperation, I even tried using Microsoft Edge, but in that browser nothing copies across at all)

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Ah ok I follow now. Yeah sorry that HTML copy-and-paste option was added later as an afterthought and isn't great (and thanks, I didn't realize it wasn't working with Edge... sheesh I'll add that to the list...). I didn't realize it, but now that I've tried it, ya it won't keep links in parentheses nor page breaks. I tried creating a PDF, then manually copying from that into LibreOffice and it did bring over the links in parentheses, but utterly failed on all other formatting (no line breaks, much less page breaks, and topped it off with some mystery characters.)

If you're handy with HTML, you could use your browser to save the entire page to your computer somewhere, then edit the HTML directly however you need. (Probably remove the Javascript in the header though as it tries to run a second time which messes stuff up.) Note that the FAQs have a few suggestions on how to hide some content in printouts and show other content only in printouts: https://wordpress.org/plugins/print-my-blog/ That might help you... sorry g2g...

dcisbusy commented 3 years ago

Thanks again for your help on this - the plugin really is awesome, even with this little hiccup.

I tried saving the entire page directly, but unfortunately that doesn't save the text at all - I assume there's something clever going on with the JS that's beyond my pay grade!

If I was really smart, I could probably do some fancy footwork with search/replace in an HTML editor to pull the hyperlinks out. I'll have a think!

All the best and thanks again, David

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Ya basically it's a bit of a stretch to get Print My Blog to make a good book right now. That's what Print My Blog Pro is supposed to be for (in the works). With it I can add pages that will only appear in the book (not on my website), reorganize pages, add a table of contents, automatically replace hyperlinks with page references (eg "See page 34") and footnotes (a number, and at the bottom of the page it says "see https://mysite.com"), etc. But the main idea is to try to keep most of the content in WordPress, and create the PDF directly from WordPress, and let WordPress be your "word processor" instead of using Microsoft Word and the like.

Out of curiosity though, why do you want to move your content into Microsoft Word or LibreOffice? Ideally Print My Blog will (eventually) make that unnecessary...

dcisbusy commented 3 years ago

Pro sounds great! I'd be interested to give it a look, but in order to publish I need tight control over things like page size, margins and also blank pages so that content falls on the 'right' side of the finished book - all very easily done in LibreOffice. It's also easy to visualise the finished book by zooming out or using Print Preview.

If Print My Blog Pro does all these things - awesome! Otherwise, an HTML copy function that does the page references and footnotes automatically would be a zinger of a feature for me!

Thanks again.

mnelson4 commented 3 years ago

Hmmm ya ok thanks for the context (it's really helpful to knowing what people want.)

Ya setting pagesize, margins, and having more control over blank pages are all possible with Pro. Visualizing the book is pretty good too because there's a drag-and-drop project organizer that even lets you organize stuff into parts.

It's all still in the works, especially the documentation (there's basically none yet). But for Pro you would:

/* Set pagesize and margins... these dimensions makes the page really long and have really big margins */
@page {
    margin: 2in;
    size: 8in 13in;
} 

/* Make each section start on the right side of the pagespread */
.pmb-section{
    break-before:right;
}

(Print My Blog Pro, under the hood, uses Prince, which basically lets you use CSS for print design. The relevant CSS documentation is here: https://www.princexml.com/doc/paged/ )

So there's the sphiel for why PMB Pro can do what you're wanting and might be a good choice.

I admit though it will certainly be easier to use a tool like LibreOffice that you're already familiar with, but I'm afraid I think I'm at least a year away from having a Pro export-to-Word/LibreOffice like you were wanting.