Actually, I really appreciate your posts Woodsman. I like the way you think and have since well before the new forum layout. So you never know what people think, ehh?
Actually, I really appreciate your posts Woodsman. I like the way you think and have since well before the new forum layout. So you never know what people think, ehh?
After a couple of weeks of tinkering and getting more less preferences etc setup, I'd like to say the new forum is great! Everything is so much more efficient and organized and I find it easier to keep track of things and what's going on. I did have some trouble at the beginning getting things to update properly (I kept getting a cached version of the page, even after it was fixed). It turned out my browser didn't like the new forum. I ended up fixing it by doing a "refresh" and that got everything working as it should.
I might have said it already, but big thank you and kudos to @Scottie for the excellent work in what was (at least from my end
) a relatively smooth changeover. 
I don't think it has one, or none that I could find either. However, it appears that functionality can be added in the form as an add-on (there's one here and another here). However, it's something that Scottie would need to look into, as it need to be programmed into the site. And not sure if those versions would even work with the latest Xenforo. My guess it could appear sometime in the future once all the kinks are worked out!
I might have said it already, but big thank you and kudos to @Scottie for the excellent work in what was (at least from my end
) a relatively smooth changeover. Hey there, I was wondering whether someone could confirm if the new forum has a 'print' function allowing us to convert threads to text? I like to read them on my e-reader when I'm on my way to work. I think I've clicked on everything 'clickable' and I can't see it.
I don't think it has one, or none that I could find either. However, it appears that functionality can be added in the form as an add-on (there's one here and another here). However, it's something that Scottie would need to look into, as it need to be programmed into the site. And not sure if those versions would even work with the latest Xenforo. My guess it could appear sometime in the future once all the kinks are worked out!
Oh yeah, I see... "print preview" is pretty broken...
Those are both for XF 1.x.
Any add-on released before Dec 2017 is for the old version. The current selection of add-ons for XF 2.0 is pretty crap.
Usually, I use Fireshot Pro for that kind of thing. It's still kind of painful for the forum since I'd have to go 1 page at a time, though.
How did you print entire threads on the old forum?
If my memory serves me well, we had a function at the top to print all the pages of the thread. So in clicking on that, we had all the content of the thread in one single shot.
I was wondering about that cuz the person commenting showed they used version 2.0 beside their name. So I wasn't sure if it was limited to v1 or also worked on v2. Then I noticed they were referring to 1.5.4 so nevermind!
There was a link on the thread labelled "print". It opened another page with everything on it (all posts in the thread). It was a handy feature, not just for reading, but also when searching. Ctrl-F and type what you are looking for and dohn!
Hey Ant22, I used to us an app called Pocket that would save web pages to your phone/tablet/PC so that you could access them offline. I would use it for subway commutes. Not sure if it would work well for the forum (I can't remember if I used it for forum pages or just SOTT), and you'd probably have to save each page separately, but it might be less cumbersome than printing
I didn't even know that feature was there on the old forum!Well, that would definitely require a fancy add-on, then.
Thank you everybody for addressing this issue.
I already thought the print button was made redundant by all the people reading this forum via cell phones and tablets.
I like to read serious stuff (especially the C's sessions) on paper, so I can make notes or underline things and, not least, take time off from watching displays and making myself comfortable.
And there's another item:
The preview function used to come with a spell check which sometimes comes in quite handy.
Are there any plans for reintroducing that function?
I already thought the print button was made redundant by all the people reading this forum via cell phones and tablets.
I like to read serious stuff (especially the C's sessions) on paper, so I can make notes or underline things and, not least, take time off from watching displays and making myself comfortable.
And there's another item:
The preview function used to come with a spell check which sometimes comes in quite handy.
Are there any plans for reintroducing that function?
Well, that would definitely require a fancy add-on, then.
That would be totally super @Scottie!!
On the old forum I sometimes clicked on 'who's online' for ideas of threads to read next when I caught up with everything and there was a bit of printing going on. The old forum would say "printing a thread" next to the name. It was very often guests but I saw members printing threads as well.
I agree everything is mobile these days, I never actually printed a thread on paper. In fact, I read the entire iodine thread while still being a fence sitter back then (over 2000 pages in Word / PDF) on my mobile. I later bought a kindle to be able to read threads on it. The printed document removed all photos, icons and signatures and only left the text so it was easy to copy and paste it into Word. I attached a sample of the first two pages of one of the threads I printed some time ago (after I adjusted the margins).
Can you put the possibility to be able to bring some articles here, or threads via our Kindle? We used to be able to do it but since one year approximately it is impossible to do it. It is very helpful to be able to read in our kindles some threads. For me is very difficult to read some stuff in my computer, I have difficulty to concentrate. Thanks!
Well, that would definitely require a fancy add-on, then.
That would be totally super @Scottie!!
I am joining the chorus here - that would be great indeed!
PS: Just discovered that you can also hyperlink smileys - still so much to discover with this new software
Don't get too excited! "That would require a fancy add-on" means that I would have to write one. As I mentioned earlier, I had to write an add-on to get old-style vid embeds to still work on the this forum. That took me the better part of a day, and it was VERY simple. Basically just a "find and replace" kind of thing. I'm still not sure how it works, because I patched together chunks of code I found on their support forum, and poof! It started working. That's not how one writes software... but in this case, what else was I gonna do? IOW, it was a shot in the dark, and it worked, so I went with it.
The trouble is, there is literally zero documentation for how to write add-ons. The developers basically say, "Oh, just look through the code and figure it out!"
Well, okay, but... The source for XenForo 2 is basically layers upon layers of classes and functions calling other functions, ad nauseum. I don't really have that level of PHP programming ability. The old forum was written in the Old Stupid Way, which made it much easier to work with (for me, anyway).
So, the time investment required is off the charts for something like a Print Friendly view. It would require knowing how to access the database, get all posts for a thread, blah blah blah. In short, it would require a deep knowledge of the how the forum code works.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that since XenForo 2 is only about 5 months old, I'm hoping that as more and more people adopt it, they will rewrite their popular add-ons for this new version. And then not only will we have more add-ons to choose from, but I will have more good code examples to learn from in order to write my own add-ons.
As an interim quasi-solution, one of these days I'll probably figure out if I can add a "print.css" that styles a single page of a thread so that all the posts on the current page of the thread are viewable in Print Preview. That should be relatively easy to do. I'm actually surprised the XF people didn't worry about that, because it's pretty standard.
Didn't have an idea this would be so difficult - thank you for explaining, Scottie! And I understand this.
I think that a print option for all posts of a single thread might become available for XenForo 2. I just did some googling and found that users had already asked for it back in 2015 and then it was available for XenForo 1. So, those who benefited or might benefit from this option may ask to get this feature for XenForo 2 either.
Sounds good to me - and thank you again for all your work!
I think that a print option for all posts of a single thread might become available for XenForo 2. I just did some googling and found that users had already asked for it back in 2015 and then it was available for XenForo 1. So, those who benefited or might benefit from this option may ask to get this feature for XenForo 2 either.
Sounds good to me - and thank you again for all your work!
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Well, just tried this... No dice! I think it has to do with the "flex" CSS rules, but overriding them doesn't solve the problem... Still only 1 page in print preview.
But then I discovered in Firefox, there is a "Simplify Page" checkbox, and if I tick that, it looks much better and all pages are printable (albeit with avatars).
In Chrome, by default it looks pretty good already.
The weird part is that if I include my print CSS, it breaks Firefox's Simplified print preview, but in Chrome, it makes it look better!
So, different browsers do different things for print preview with complicated CSS. Which is annoying...
No wonder somebody made an add-on for it: they needed to generate a very simple HTML page that works nicely with Print Preview on all browsers.
Such a simple thing, yet so complicated in the end!
Thanks very much, Scottie! It works for me. Just have to scale it down to 70 or 60% to save some ink and paper...
