Currently I am using One Click Page to PDF to get the job done, although the lack of working open-source tools fit for this task has led me to creating my own; the web page "that won't print" is this Khan Academy article.

It seems as though I have 2 options, both involving Playwright:

A. (Somehow) embed text on a page screenshot

• pros:
  • I can get the whole page all at once without worrying about bits being cut off
• cons:
  • positioning text layer in the right place is likely going to be a pain
  • splitting one long 'scroll' into PDF pages will be a fiddly process

B. Generate a single-page PDF of what is currently visible, scroll just enough for the next page and repeat, combining all PDFs into one

• pros:
  • no awkward image-to-PDF-with-text conversion required (pagination and text layer come out of the box)
• cons:
  • figuring out just how much to scroll won't be trivial (easy to under/overshoot)
  • page header and footer removal is required (otherwise they would be repeated for every page)

Before I embarked in this quest, I was curious to hear opinions from the more experienced!

I will try to code in Javascript as I understand this gives greater flexibility in Playwright, although if I can I would generally find my way easier in Python - how do you think I should tackle this problem aiming for a simple and effective solution?

Web2PDF is likely the closest base I can work from: it runs directly in browser, so as a program it is simpler to work with and more straightforward to debug.

posted 3 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

Elefy‭

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