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Comment by ggchappell | Hacker News Reader

What about printable?

One of my major uses for Readbility was to format articles so that I could print them out for later reading. But a recent change to Readability made it so that (at least under Firefox) the browser print function will not break an article into multiple pages. And that makes it pretty useless for printing.

Whatever the problem is, Readable has it, too. Can something be done about this? (Also, does anyone know what the problem is?)

In any case, improving the readability of the web is a worthy goal. Thanks for your efforts.

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I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it.

Could you provide more details, please? -- URL of an example article, more details on what exactly happens that shouldn't happen.

If you'd like, you can get in touch, to do this (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/) -- as a matter of fact, it would probably be preferable, as opposed to using HC as a bug reporting forum.

I'll do both (report here & there).

I just tried the top five HN links. All exhibited the problem.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/04/16/powers...

http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf

http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37525/?p1=A2&a...

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/05/solar-fire/

For each, I clicked on the link, and then clicked my newly made Readable bookmark, which I had set up using the default settings. Then I went to Firefox's File:Print Preview. I have it set on the default settings (Shrink to Fit, Portrait). For each of the five articles listed above, the result was that only one of the displayed pages had article text on it, and this was not the entire article, since it would not fit on a single page. Sometimes other pages were displayed, sometimes not, but if there were any, then they were blank pages.

I am running Firefox 3.6.16 under Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid). I'm perhaps a bit behind in my patching, but, in any case, this is not a new problem.

The problem, in the steps you said you followed, is the "Print Preview" step. File >> Print Preview will show you a preview of how the entire current page will look like, when printed -- but that's actually not what you want to print.

What you want to print is only contents of Readable's overlay. To that end, please use the Print link, shown in the menu at the bottom of the overlay -- unfortunately, there is no "Print Preview" available.

The technical explanation for this is that Readable's overlay is actually an IFrame -- and browsers support printing the iframe contents as if the iframe were a window onto itself; but they will print the iframe as an element in the main page, when you're printing that instead.

Wow.

Well, you're right. "Print" works fine.

Three suggestions for you:

(1) Make the "Print" link easier to get at. Not just 'way down at the bottom of the page. Maybe put one with the "Close" link at the upper-right?

(2) Change the text of the "Close" links. I'm not sure what they should say; but "Close" doesn't really convey the right idea. What it actually does, from the user's POV, is not closing, but rather returning to the original styling.

(3) Maybe figure out how to make Readable work with Firefox's Print Preview. (I realize that FF's behavior isn't your fault, but it would still be nifty if it worked.)

Thanks again for all your work.

Readable's interface is due for a slight overhaul. But I haven't yet decided what the new design is going to be. I will take your suggestions into consideration, though.

As for the work: you are most welcome.

Easily reproduced. Tried on the following page:

http://www.go-hero.net/jam/11/languages

Thanks for confirming. Read my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2526937

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