C-Command Software Forum

PDF's of Web Pages No Longer Retain URL Links...

#1

Hello,

I had a hard drive failure on my iMac running Leopard a few months ago and recently came back online with a new iMac running Lion.

I just got EagleFiler running again only to find web pages imported as PDF’s no longer retain embedded URL’s. At first I thought this was a problem with EagleFiler but apparently the issue is with Lion’s PDF rendering engine and/or webkit, though it affects Firefox as well so I lean strongly towards Lion’s PDF rendering engine, which is what I believe EagleFiler uses. ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3204750?start=0&tstart=0 ).

Anyway, I’ve been searching for a terminal command or plist preference as a resolution, but thus far any fix has proved elusive.

Has anyone figured out a workaround for this problem?

Thank you,

James

#2

It’s a bug in the WebKit that was introduced with Safari 5.1. The workarounds are to choose a different Web page format in EagleFiler’s preferences or to create your PDF using a non-WebKit browser, if you can find one that puts clickable links in PDFs (Firefox doesn’t).

Here’s another EagleFiler thread mentioning this issue, and unfortunately there are many more around the Web, since the bug also affects PDFs created by Safari itself.

#3

Thanks Michael!

I just tested Mozilla SeaMonkey and EF can’t seem to import from that browser which of course begs the question - are you (or anyone) aware of an EagleFiler compatible browser that can be used as a work around while we wait for Apple to fix this… which knowing them could be a really long time (Grrrrr).

Kindly,

James

#4

I can look into whether it’s possible to add EagleFiler capture support for SeaMonkey. However, that doesn’t really matter as far as the PDF issue. EagleFiler always uses WebKit to render the pages into PDF format. It would just be getting the URL from SeaMonkey. The more interesting question is whether SeaMonkey can File > Print to PDFs containing links. I’m not aware of any browsers that can do this, aside from WebKit-based ones pre-Safari 5.1, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

#5

Hi Michael,

FWIW, SeaMonkey fails the File > Print test. Please don’t trouble yourself on this. I’ll just wait until the webkit issue is resolved. For now I’m capturing as webarchives and I’ve cobbled together a bunch of AppleScripts to set titles, filenames and dates, etc which I execute with iKey.

Once the webkit issue has been resolved, I’ll attempt to convert the webarchives to PDF with this AppleScript ( http://c-command.com/scripts/eaglefiler/web-archive-to-pdf ).

All the best,

James

#6

This seems to be fixed with Mac OS X 10.7.4 and Safari 5.1.7.