Printing whole threads

Would you like to be able to print whole threads?

  • Excellent idea

    Votes: 16 64.0%

  • Good idea

    Votes: 3 12.0%

  • Not fussed

    Votes: 5 20.0%

  • Bad idea

    Votes: 1 4.0%
  • Total voters
    25
frugi

frugi

1
Messages
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Being able to print a thread or transfer it to a portable reader is handy.

However (I may be wrong) it looks as if we are restricted to 40 posts per page, even when Show Printable Version of a thread is selected. It would be more useful to be able to print an entire thread in one go, rather than having it split into several pages. Is there a way of doing this?

Here's an example of how ET does it. :eek:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/printthread.php?threadid=63202

Cheers.
 
Last edited:
frugi said:
Being able to print a thread or transfer it to a portable reader is handy
Click to expand...
I prefer to save threads to disk as Word files so I go to 'show printable version', select all, paste into Word, and repeat for all the 40-post pages there are in the thread. They need tidying up once in Word, i.e. quoted text needs shifting within the post box, images need resizing to fit in the box and superfluous verbiage needs pruning, which I do manually. It takes some time to make a Word version of a long thread, but is worth it for me.

It would be good to reduce that manual workload. Maybe an 'Export to Word / RTF / PDF' function.

Just counted and I've saved 71 threads this way - a great learning resource.
 
Better still, if ur into printing threads, would be the ability to select the posts out of it, say by means of a check box, so you would in essence become your own mod in what it was you printed, thus printing a thread ex the garbage.
 
I can suggest even better way than copying it to word doc.
If you use IE instead of firefox (or you can use it once for doing this) than once the printable version of a thread (either with 40 posts or the whole lot) is ready you can save it as "Web Archive, single file (*.mht)". It will have all the pictures in it and look exactly as the original.
 
1. D'oh! I didn't realise that "Show Printable Version" did open the attachments to full size. This is excellent news. However one niggle (apart from the 40 page split one) is that it seems to stack multiple images/attachments horizontally rather than vertically, which makes exporting more of a chore than it need be. Please could they be stacked on top of each other instead?

See this thread and how wasp's images stretch off into the far right yonder.
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/printthread.php?t=23420


2. Egro thanks for the tip, even if it means occasionally soiling one's PC with IE. But doesn't Firefox do this as well, under "Save Page As ... Web Page, Complete"? You get an .htm file and a folder of images, at least on my version. Perhaps the IE way is better - I've not used it for a long time. Either way dumping to HTML is imho the quickest method of saving a whole thread, although as blackcab says
superfluous verbiage needs pruning.
Click to expand...
Failing roguetrader's excellent idea of checkboxes I'm sure we could knock up a macro. :)

3. www.primopdf.com provides a useful free tool for exporting web pages (and indeed most other formats) to PDF. Until I discovered the excellent Book Designer I used to use it to shrink web pages to portable size (it reflows text to suit the chosen page size, as opposed to shrinking it to an illegibly small typeface) and it does a pretty good job. You simply install it, then Print using PrimoPDF as your virtual printer. However it has problems with wide images and cuts off anything beyond the right boundary, which I why I suggest stacking the attachments vertically.

4. A further idea. It would be handy to be able to print all posts by one member. At the moment a search for one member's posts brings up links to them. Would it be possible to bring up all their entire posts, again on one page in the Printable format?

Sorry, my trivial demands are probably slipping into fantasy land now. :eek: If the 40 posts per page limit can be removed I'll be a very happy creature. :)
 
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Thanks for the feedback - they sound like good suggestions. We're upgrading the forum software soon, so some of these suggestions may already be implemented. If not, we'll review them immediately after upgrading.
 
Sharky said:
Thanks for the feedback - they sound like good suggestions. We're upgrading the forum software soon, so some of these suggestions may already be implemented. If not, we'll review them immediately after upgrading.
Click to expand...

This might be a bit far fetched, but if I save threads I export them to PDF.
A long time ago (on ET) I tried the print thread option but didn't like that.... I prefered the standard layout and wanted to preserve it exactly as I saw it on screen, but I had to copy&paste each image manually and fit it in the right place. So I copied everything into a Word document and then exported it to PDF (there are free PDF converters available). I know this is probably not going to be easy, but if - somewhere in the future - you could export a whole thread (including images, links, attachments) to a neat PDF file, t2w would surely have the upper hand (even more) on any other forum out there.
 
I just copy posts messages and threads into Word also. Have to use IE though, as Firefox not good at this task.
 
A new "save thread as a PDF" will be added next week. We installed the upgrade this week, but we need to fix something before it goes live.
 
Most useful facility for me would be the ability to select individual posts by "checkbox" for subsequent printing / export etc. This would save a whole load of cut / paste /edit which is plain ba**s-aching.
 
0007 said:
Most useful facility for me would be the ability to select individual posts by "checkbox" for subsequent printing / export etc. This would save a whole load of cut / paste /edit which is plain ba**s-aching.
Click to expand...

I completely agree. Some threads contain real gems and when exporting them you won't to get rid of all the garbage. Probably not that easy to implement though (or is it? :)
 
Thanks for the suggestion 0007. We could fairly easy add the ability to print an inidividual post if you think that's useful. A facility to print multiple posts via checkboxes sounds ideal but as firewalker99 predicts will require some development time.

Another enhancement we'll be adding shortly will be the display of full-size image attachments within the printable version of the thread.
 
Sharky said:
Thanks for the suggestion 0007. We could fairly easy add the ability to print an inidividual post if you think that's useful. A facility to print multiple posts via checkboxes sounds ideal but as firewalker99 predicts will require some development time.

Another enhancement we'll be adding shortly will be the display of full-size image attachments within the printable version of the thread.
Click to expand...

You make my wildest dreams come true :cheesy:
 
Sharky said:
Thanks for the suggestion 0007. We could fairly easy add the ability to print an inidividual post if you think that's useful. A facility to print multiple posts via checkboxes sounds ideal but as firewalker99 predicts will require some development time.

Another enhancement we'll be adding shortly will be the display of full-size image attachments within the printable version of the thread.
Click to expand...

The "Download as PDF" function works nicely, and pretty fast too I might add. Although to be honest I haven't exactly exporting threads with more than 10.000 posts :cheesy:

Would be a real beauty if we could have attached charts embedded in the PDF export result. On the nice-to-have list for 2008 ;)
 
We'll fix this tomorrow - don't you worry! Sorry about the problems, when we upgraded the forums a couple of weeks ago, it reverted to it's old bad ways.
 
Sharky said:
We'll fix this tomorrow - don't you worry! Sorry about the problems, when we upgraded the forums a couple of weeks ago, it reverted to it's old bad ways.
Click to expand...

Sorry to keep nagging about this, but the problem remains...
The function is a very interesting one and I'm sure a lot of people like to use it, but if it caps off each time after a certain amount of posts, there's no point in using it at all.
 
Just noticed another thing...

Trying to download a thread as PDF fails completely when you try to do that from within a private board. I only get two pages without any real content.
 
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