Update (April 13, 2019): If you’re looking to print your entire WordPress site, try my plugin Print My Blog. The ideas from this post led to its creation.
I previously wrote about the conundrum of preserving your WordPress blog for a hundred years or so. The main solution I suggested was putting your blog’s content on Family Search… but the majority of commenters said they mostly wanted to just print it out on plain old paper.
So how can you print your blog and can it be easier?
Existing Ways To Print Your Blog
Print Each Page Individually
Some of the bloggers said they just printed each blog post, one at a time.
Browsers allow you to print the web page you’re visiting, so this seems pretty easy, right?
But manually printing each blog post is exhausting. (Ok, a Medieval Monk would have a different idea of exhaustion, having spent most of their lives just copying texts, but it’s painfully slow by modern standards.)
Also, usually your web page doesn’t print very well. You probably have a colorful header –which looks great on the screen but eats up ink. Or maybe a suggested posts widget or footer navigation –again, nice on the web not a waste of paper. And Heaven forbid your blog has white text on a black background.
So, manually printing each blog might not be the best way to go.
Print with some Printer Friendly Plugins
There are WordPress plugins for making your website more printer friendly.
Eg
These plugins should add a button on your post which will make it print it in a printer-friendly manner. Eg when you print the page, they’ll put your content on a white background, and remove sidebar widgets and menus.
So, those help the printed page look better and use less ink, but it’s still just as time consuming.
Anthologize Plugin
The Anthologize plugin is meant for creating an e-book from your blog’s posts. It can create the e-book in a lot of different formats, including PDF. You can then print the PDF file. It will be very printer friendly (you’re now printing an e-book, not a website) and you only need to press print once for the entire e-book, not each blog post individually.
So that’s pretty great. I took it for a spin and it worked great on my blog with dozens of blog posts.
But there are two main drawbacks: it might not work on really big blogs, and it’s a lot of clicks.
If your blog has more than a hundred blog posts, the e-book will also have a few hundred pages. Most servers will choke trying to make an e-book that large.
And it’s built to be very customizable, so there are a lot of options. I’m afraid it’s not just a matter of “click here to print your blog”. Most people will be able to figure it out eventually, but it’s a bit of work.
Print My Blog Plugin Proposal
So I’m thinking of creating another plugin to fill the need for an easy way to print your entire blog’s contents, reliably, in a printer-friendly manner.
The plugin could:
- have an admin page, on which is a button saying just “print my blog” and whatever other options we’ll need,
- when clicked, we’ll open a new page, and fetch a few posts’ content at a time and add them to this page,
- while we’re creating this massive page, we’ll initially hide all the content that’s being added onto it. Instead, we’ll just show a progress bar so folks won’t get distracted.
- when we’ve finished fetching all the blog posts and dumping them into this massive page, we’ll have two buttons: one to print the page, and one to download as a PDF
- clicking to print the page will just print the page. However, we’ll use some CSS magic to make the page’s content appear only when printing, and have the button to print it disappear when being printed.
- clicking to download the PDF will use some Javascript library to create a PDF from the web page. (I’d like to try doing it from Javascript, because not only can it take a long time, which makes doing it on the server likely to fail, but the server-side PDF-generating libraries I’ve used don’t support foreign characters very well.)
I’m undecided whether to have this plugin piggy-back on Anthologize, or make it from scratch. Piggy-backing on Anthologize will bring lots of features, but also a few of its struggles (eg, overwhelming number of options and difficulty generating the files on the server). And right now, the proposed plan seems fairly straight-forward.
If you have suggestions on existing easy ways to print your entire blog, or suggestions on what features you’d like, feel free to comment.
Similar Stuff I've Written
How to Add Print, PDF, & eBook Buttons to your WordPress Website with Print My Blog
Preserve your Story with "Print My Blog" WordPress Plugin
Quickly Turn your Entire WordPress Blog into an eBook with Print My Blog and dotEPUB
Print My Blog WordPress Plugin Transparency Report – May 2019
How Print My Blog Makes YouTube Videos Look Good When Printed, and You Can Too
Print My Blog Transparency Report – July 2019
Print My Blog Transparency Report – November 2019
Print My Blog Transparency Report – August 2019
Print My Blog Transparency Report – June 2019
Powered by YARPP.
I love your plug-in plan, Mike, especially the simple “print my blog” feature. Last month, I did begin to experiment with the Anthologize Plug-In. As my blog contains over 300 posts, and is image heavy, the extensive tweaking that was required to make a reasonable looking print-out was overwhelming. I then looked at some services like blog2print. The biggest problem with that was on almost all of my photos, a large red Pinterest button appeared in the middle of each image. I don’t actively use Pinterest so tried to kill the button — without success. I wrote to the Blog-2-Print Support Staff. Their advice was to remove and re-add each image manually. Seriously!! Giving up on all of that, I then began to cut and paste my blog into a Word Document. I got to 25 posts (50 pages) and since then have taken a very long break from this entire project!
In full disclosure, I’ve discovered that at least the default themes all print very nicely, contrary to what I thought. Eg even if you set a black background, giant logo image, and have lots of sidebar widgets, default themes like twentyseventeen don’t show them.
Seeing how printing is a bit unusual, I suspect not all themes will do this so well.