Issue creating multi-page PDF documents

Tbird2022 wrote:

Has anyone experienced the same situation?

Sure. Some websites actually don't have multi-page content. It's fake. It re-draws content as you scroll down. They do this to minimize the data in the browser window. Some pages could display an infinite amount of data and that would blow out the RAM on people's local browsers. So they only display the page you are looking at.

But then when you try to print from such a site, you only get the page you are looking at. Safari can't print what Safari can't see. You would have to use some facility from the site itself that can generate all of the content and make it available to you as a download.

dialabrain wrote:

Well, I can only work with the samples but the way I created the PDF in Safari was to chose "Print…" from the file menu, made sure "All" was selected, then clicking on the PDF button and chose "Save as PDF" from the menu.

The website wouldn't have included the custom print function if they didn't think they needed it.

You can see the effect in Google Groups. Just search for me and click on one of the hundreds of stalker threads. You won't be able to save more than a single page of output. Here is a new post just an hour ago trying to stir up trouble here in the forums. Use Safari's "Export to PDF" feature to get a good representation of the page as displayed. If you use the "Print" feature and save to PDF, then you get a low-quality "printout" version. But because of the way that Google Groups renders content, you only get a single page at a time.

Compare that to the ASC thread that stalker is trying to stir up. The Apple forum software has built-in pagination. It doesn't have Google's infinite page length. Therefore, you can use Export to PDF and it works well. Print works too, but it is going to use special "print" styles that look awful.

My guess is that the paid Racing Form page has a similar infinite page length and it needs custom logic to generate pages. That's just a downside of the modern Javascript-driven web.

Well, I can only work with the samples but the way I created the PDF in Safari was to chose "Print…" from the file menu, made sure "All" was selected, then clicking on the PDF button and chose "Save as PDF" from the menu.

Tbird2022 wrote:

I don't understand EtreCheck's explanation.

Just compare how this site works. This Apple site has already paginated the content. We are now on page 2. There is no way you can print both page 1 and page 2. If you look at page 1, it is quite long. If you printed it, it would be more than one "page". But there is a limit to how long a single page can get. Once it gets too long, it automatically changes into a multi-page display where users have to manually go from page 1 to page 2.

Your racing form site, which we can't access because it is a paid site, seems to work differently. A single page can be quite long, even multiple printed "pages". But they handle the overflow differently. They don't force you to manually go from page 1 to page 2. They display an infinite page and only redraw what is necessary. But this functionality cannot be completely rendered in Safari. Safari can only print what it can see and the web site never gives Safari all of the (potentially infinite) content.

This Apple forum has millions of users and enormous data and bandwidth requirements. But it's a free support site with relatively few actual developers. Your racing page is a paid site, which a much smaller user base, so it has more developer resources than Apple and lower bandwidth load. They have more freedom to make it fancy, at the cost of breaking browser features. But they have a built-in print function, so it's all good.

Are you referring to what they call PPs? From Firefox using "Print…"

From Safari…

Have you tried another browser such as Brave or Firefox?

And what happens when you choose "Save as PDF…"?

I don't really need screen shots. I need to know what happens once you select "Save as PDF" from the drop down menu.