Is there an easy way to print to a picture file (any type)?

Luis,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Just so you know, I'm using a new iMac with Yosemite installed. I'm trying to print or otherwise save web pages for courses I'm taking online at ed.X, along with Coursera, which sometimes show similar problems. I try and print exams before I start them and I fill them in on hardcopy. So my first goal is to print them to my Canon printer, which fails, but I've also found that exporting or printing these same web pages to a pdf file also shows the exact same rendering problem. Both Safari and Chrome browsers are the same, neither work. The only solution I've had is to use OS X Grapper and print the missing content from Grabber, page by page, which is very tedious.

My experience has been that printing to a raster file is the most reliable way to reproduce what you see on the screen as it is also a raster image. Screen grabbers are the most reliable way of getting images from the screen into a file or to a printer. However, they usually are tedious to perform and generate huge files, and of course do not scale well. I used to use a print-to-fax drivers to perform this function, but that option is not available in the add printers dialog on my Mac.

I'm not so optimistic that if I solve this particular instance of inaccurate rendering that it will solve the overall problem of occasional bad pdf renderings. This is just one of several examples I will give here, and I have have seen many instances where a pdf file is not faithful rendered from what is seen on the screen, across may different viewers/browser/apps. But just the same, I'm attaching a screen shot showing the problem. This is of a web page where I have called up the print dialog, and in the dialog you will see a preview pane showing the page that is not rendering correctly. The graphic below the dialog is what is supposed to print, but instead you can see in the preview pane that it is blank.

I cannot send you the URL for this page as it is an active link and will not work for you. Its available on ed.X for the course MIT 7.28.1x, quiz 8, page 6. To get to this page, you'd probably have to create a log in and register for the course. Its all free, but would of course take some time for you to get there.

Anyway, I would still like a simple easy way to print a multi-page document to a picture file. I occasionally want to use a picture file editor to mark up such files, and printing to a raster file would ease that process, allowing me to skip the step of using a screen grabber, page by page.

Barney,

I've tried to explain in a response to another later posting what the problem is. Just to be clear, print drivers usually have to convert from some internal format, in my case HTML, to a format that is recognized by the printer. Most printers these days support pdf, but in times past each printer manufacturer had their own format, and early printers mostly used pure bit map images for printing graphics and even text. Now, when printing some graphics objects, like photos, these are encoded as BIT mapped images embedded as objects in the pdf file, but they are BIT maps just the same.

It was not uncommon to be able to divert files going to a raster printer to a file, just like you can divert a pdf file from going to a printer to instead go to a file. This is what I mean by printing to a picture file. If you have used a print-to-fax capability (outgoing), a copy of the fax was invariable saved automatically and the format was typcially multi-page TIFF. This is exactly what I am asking for.

You can open these picture files with a picture editor, edit them, and also re-save them as jpg, gif, or png. This is a very hand feature that is not readily available on my Mac, and this I do not understand.

Luis,

I found that the first graphic rendered ok. You have to scroll down to the second graphic, which is on page 3. That is the one that does not render.

Thanks

All,

Thanks for your suggestions, but I figured out at least part of the solution. First, regarding the suggestions you provided, I tried using Chrome with exactly the same results. Also, I the reset printer, deleted and reinstalled the printer, and of course rebooted many times, and none of this made any difference.

I've been fighting the issues of improperly rendered pdf files for a long time. Actually, its not just pdf rendering that's a problem. Sometimes the display doesn't render properly, but the pdf file, when sent to the printer, is ok. So my conclusion is that all forms of rendering have problems from time-to-time, and they change depending upon the source and target.

The short term solution was to check the box 'Print backgrounds' in the print dialog. That immediately turned on the unrendered graphic. The same dialog appears in Chrome and fixes the problem there as well.

I still don't have a solution for printing to a picture file. At a minimum, I'd like to be able to print to a multi-page TIFF, which is the common format for FAX applications. My guess is I can find an app that provides the feature, but I'll save that for another day.

Thanks again for all of your responses.