Download entire SUBJECT as PDF

[forumuser]

Is there a plugin where you can download an entire Subject as a PDF file?

[Kami]

No.

And I don't think we can make one to do so, but tagging uhhh Peter or Chris to make sure.

[Peter]

It's possible, but not something I have ever looked too deeply (JavaScript side) into myself as most of it I offload to the server.

There are libraries out there to do the heavy work for you (i.e jsPDF), but I haven't looked at them so not sure how well they work.

[Kami]

Apr 5, 2019 15:39:46 GMT -8 Peter said:

It's possible, but not something I have ever looked too deeply (JavaScript side) into myself as most of it I offload to the server.

There are libraries out there to do the heavy work for you (i.e jsPDF), but I haven't looked at them so not sure how well they work.

Is it allowed also? I know we're not allowed to content scrape as per the TOS but IDK if this would fall under that.

[Peter]

Apr 5, 2019 15:55:43 GMT -8 Kami said:

Apr 5, 2019 15:39:46 GMT -8 Peter said:

It's possible, but not something I have ever looked too deeply (JavaScript side) into myself as most of it I offload to the server.

There are libraries out there to do the heavy work for you (i.e jsPDF), but I haven't looked at them so not sure how well they work.

Is it allowed also? I know we're not allowed to content scrape as per the TOS but IDK if this would fall under that.

It's not automated, and it's client side.  The user would have to initiate the call for the PDF to be created and then save it.  So if it was used to scrape data, it would be extremely inefficient and only good for the page they are viewing.  

You may as well just save the page in HTML form, and looking at some of the PDF libraries, it doesn't convert the content to actual text.  Most convert the HTML to canvas, then embed the canvas image into the PDF.

[Kami]

 would then this work for downloading an entire thread if it had multiple pages?

[Peter]

Nope, as we don't have anyway to pull the other posts from other pages unless the user loads them (then we could technically grab the cache of them).

Basically it's pointless, and plugin won't get filled

[Chris]

There are virtual printer software you can install to convert to PDF so no online plugin is really necessary here. There however used to be a print function in the previous Proboards version that did away with all the visual fluffery and placed every post in a thread on a single page for printing but if I recall correctly that was removed because on very long threads (100+ pages?) it had the unfortunate effect of stalling some user's browser while the print page was loading (was it a well used feature? IDK).

I do remember looking for some undocumented call when V5 dropped that could replicate that feature from V4 into V5 but no luck. I later revisited the issue in a plugin request to print a single post by also allowing for multiple selected posts with the intent of semi-automatic page spanning for an "all posts in thread" option to remain within the rules but almost immediately abandoned that as still being too cumbersome and teetering on the edge of skirting the rules. Hopefully V6 might bring back the old print thread in some fashion or reveal that the option was always inside of us even before we started down the yellow brick road.