Print What You Like

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The Latest Updates

6 Comments November 21st, 2008 by Jonathan

It has been a looooooong time since I’ve written anything here! Fortunately there is a good reason- I’ve been busy working on new features and fixing lots and lots of bugs. The biggest new feature is the option to save a page to pdf. This turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. After more than a week of teeth gnashing I finally came up with a ridiculously complicated Rube Goldberg method of saving the pdf that involved sending the data back and forth between the server and the browser. It worked, and it dodged all the browser bugs and incompatibilities that make ajax programming so adventurous, but it wasn’t pretty. Then a few days ago I learned a javascript trick using document.write, and in the space of an afternoon rewrote all the ‘save as pdf’ code into something that was simpler, faster, more reliable, and 1/3 as much code. Don’t you hate it when that happens!

Since going live, I’ve also made a lot of other changes, most of which aren’t as visible.

  • PrintWhatYouLike now handles sites with frames intelligently instead of just giving up and returning an error message.
  • The site also handles pages with international characters correctly. I’m not sure how I overlooked that while testing the app before it went live, but lots of people emailed to let me know about it šŸ™‚
  • Pwyl can now handle any type of url, including urls with spaces in them
  • And tons of smaller bug fixes

Now I’m working on a browser plugin that will run the PrintWhatYouLike editor inside your browser. The advantage of this is that you can edit private/password-protected pages like your email (assuming you have webmail). So finally there will an easy way to print emails without those stupid three page legal disclaimers every corporation insists on putting at the bottom of every email!

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6 Comments Add your own

  1. Dave Gibbons says:

    I have an easy “bug” for you to fix. Your link to “Try The Demo” on the home page talks about “changing the font type with the dropdown.” You say “sans-serif fonts like Times New Roman print better” I think if you look up the definition of “sans” you will find that means “without.” A font that is a sans-serif font has no serifs. Yes, Times New Roman prints better, but it is a font with serifs. It has serifs. An example of a sans-serif font would be the font “Ariel” which does not print as well as Times New Roman because it is “without” or “sans” serifs.

    I’m picking nits here, and do not mean to detract from your fine website, only improve it.

    Dave Gibbons

  2. Isa says:

    “The site also handles pages with international characters correctly. Iā€™m not sure how I overlooked that while testing the app before it went live, but lots of people emailed to let me know about it”

    Actually, I am afraid that these problems are not solved yet, because special characters are not correctly handled. I have reported about it – using Getsatisfaction, but I hope there is a fix !

  3. Chanchal Kumar Ghosh says:

    Save as PDF is not working…