534225 - Support saving full-page views to PDF

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[davesweeps]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en; rv:1.9.0.17pre) Gecko/2009121100 Camino/2.1a1pre (like Firefox/3.0.17pre)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en; rv:1.9.0.17pre) Gecko/2009121100 Camino/2.1a1pre (like Firefox/3.0.17pre)

Feature Request:

Add a Print to PDf just like Omniweb. Omniweb prints the page as it is seen in a PDF form. Somehow it doesn't seem to have to rerender the page or anything. You get a 1-page exact length PDF just like you see on your scene in a second flat. Although there are add-ons for this they don't work properly and they rerender the page in Webkit without the cookies display preferences so it looks bad. Moreover some javascript functioning-sites now disallows print format printing in Paparrazzi such as the NYT website while Omniweb's method works great.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Try to print to PDF
2.It doesn't exist.
3.

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Does Layers's new WebShot feature do what you want? http://layersapp.com/

(Note for anyone looking in OW for this feature, it's "Save as PDF…", an alternate menu item in File)

Comment 2

[davesweeps]

That's PSD. Money and conversion time expense. I think a Save to PDF function would be helpful to people who save a webpage for offline printing/reading.

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Actually, it seems that OmniWeb does switch to the print stylesheet when saving these; compare http://mosspuppet.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/arringtons-bad-joojoo/ on screen vs. the output of "Save as PDF…" and "Print…".

Comment 4

[davesweeps]

Hmmmm...You're right.

But it is printing the NYT print pages correctly. NYT seems to have disallowed linking directly to a print page like: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/sports/ncaafootball/11irish.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Omniweb will print that correctly. Paprrazzi can't print it.

I just thought it would be a nice addition if Camino could outdo everybody and save to pdf the exact layout of the screen w/o redraw/reload etc on a one page pdf. If that's even possible.

Comment 5

[philippe (part-time)]

(In reply to comment #4)

> I just thought it would be a nice addition if Camino could outdo everybody and
> save to pdf the exact layout of the screen w/o redraw/reload etc on a one page
> pdf. If that's even possible.

As an endlessly long pdf 'page' if necessary ? (for example, the page on screen has a 10 screens worth length). And complete with clickable links - iirc, that is what OmniWeb does.

Anyway, I think this would very much depend on what Gecko (the rendering engine) provides. I don't think Gecko provides enough hooks for that, right now.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

This seems like a Good Idea™ pending Gecko support for it. Is there a Core bug filed on supporting this sort of thing in Gecko?

Comment 7

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

You can do it already (at least outputting to a PNG; not sure about PDF); brade wrote a Firefox extension years ago that does this.  I think I also remember looking at our tabsposé code at one point and seeing that we explicitly size/crop to the window there, so it might be possible to use that codepath to get a full-webpage image.

Comment 8

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> looking at our tabsposé code at one point and seeing that we explicitly
> size/crop to the window there, so it might be possible to use that codepath to
> get a full-webpage image.

See CHBV's |snapshot|, in particular the comments toward the beginning and the end about how we manipulate the rects to just snapshot what's on screen in the browser window.

Clickable links would be another problem, though; I'm not sure there's any way to get those in Gecko other than in an HTML-type document.