Thanks. I found some things there. One is a Ruby script which purports to download an entire thread, but I know nothing about Ruby. However, one suggestion was to turn off Jacascript, and that works, sort-of. It breaks the thread up into chunks, but at least you can PDF each one.
Hey Dan,
This is the one absolutely ginormous flaw in Discourse.
It needs to be possible to save a thread as a PDF or Webarchvie.
Please take the time to complain on the meta.discourse.org.
The devs don't seem to get it.
-Chris
Done. And this was their reply:
Why does it need to be convenient? The request comes up so rarely. Printing is not not even a 1% of the time task these days.
Thanks for throwing me to the wolves.
Yeah, I did. Here's one hopeful solution, if anyone knows Ruby: Export content for offline usage - #4 by erlend_sh - feature - Discourse Meta
Dan, which topic are you trying to save as PDF?
I thought I'd give Evernote a try.
Two of them:
Thanks for giving it a shot. Since I can (apparently) do this manually by turning off JS and saving to PDF (every 20 posts), don't spend too much time on it. But thanks!!
Here’s how I got PDFs of a couple of long topics. I believe I got everything, but until I actually sit down and read them, I won’t know for sure. But assume they worked correctly unless I post more.
First, I used Safari. It has a Developer menu item for turning Javascript off and on, so that was easy. The same might apply to Chrome, I don’t know (or care, right now).
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I went to the Topic I wanted to save, to the top of the topic.
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Turned Javascript off, and refreshed the page.
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By clicking and dragging, I selected all the text I cared about, and copied it to the clipboard.
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I pasted it into TextEdit. Amazingly, it comes in pretty well, with no apparent truncation of anything. I had tried Word first, and it didn’t work nearly as well. Shouldn’t be surprised…
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Went to the next page, copied and pasted to the end of the TextEdit document, and continued until I had the entire topic.
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I set the TextEdit page size to tabloid, landscape.
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Exported as PDF.
As I said, everything looks fairly good right now. Smileys are too big, but that’s OK.
However, the default “silhouette” icon displays really big. People should change this. I’m talking to you, @ccstone. Oh, I see you’ve changed it now. Well, good on ya. 
Close, but no cigar! The Evernote Chrome Clipper captured all but the last 5 posts of the first topic.
Have you tried the Ruby approach? I don't know anything either about Ruby, but can you just run the Ruby script, or does it take customization?
Someone said it requires some customization, and it doesn't look obvious, at least at first glance.
I'm amazed how much I don't want to learn new programming languages. When I was younger, I wanted to learn everything. Now I say "let someone else do it". 
I bought an IBM PC when it first came out, bought the books with the BIOS assembly language listings, everything. Nowadays, all I do is say "when I was your age, we had to program in ones and zeroes, and we didn't even have zeroes - we had to use the letter 'O'". Harrumph. 
1 Like
Oh, yeah - thanks for trying! LOL.
I took a quick look at the Ruby script. It has NO documentation of any kind, no readme, no internal comments. Even if one did know Ruby, it would be a challenge to use/modify.
So that's not a solution for me either.
Comments? We don’t need to stinking comments!
Thanks for looking, anyway. As I said, it really wasn’t that hard to do manually. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Besides, we could probably build a KM macro to do it if we really needed it.
Hey Dan,
[Profanity elided…]
It only comes up rarely, because of answers like that one.
I wonder how many Discourse forums there are for technical topics where it is of value to archive.
These guys don't care, because they can run their own copy of Discourse and keep a local archive if they want one.
But I want searchable reference materials...
Meh!
-Chris
While I agree that we should be able to create a PDF of the full topic, it does not seem likely that the Discourse developers have any interest in providing this feature.
So, as a pretty good workaround, I have found that using the Evernote Web Clipper of selected posts within a topic to meet virtually all of my needs. This captures the key parts of the thread, as well as providing a link back to the full thread, should you need it.
Once you have sync’d your EN Mac app with the EN Cloud, you have everything you will likely need, even if you can’t access the Internet.
I should note that I use almost exclusively the Chrome Browser, and Evernote Clipper on that browser. I think the EN Safari Clipper works just as well, but I can’t personally testify to that.
Yeah, I typed, deleted, and retyped quite a few times before I actually posted a response. Glad I did, because they did end up trying to be helpful.
Honestly, my post could have been taken as an attack - I regularly put my foot in my mouth. So don't hold it against them.
Much.
It looks like the Discourse people are finally implementing this feature. I admit that I haven’t read the latest posts on the subject, but I get sent an email for them, and a very cursory glance indicates it’s being worked on.
Thought I’d let people know.
2 Likes
Implemented, or not yet?
I like that idea.
But when I tried to print from Discourse just now, blank pages (with headers & footers.)
To get past screen printing, I clipped to DevonThink as a web archive.
From there, direct to printer -- no PDF needed.
Below are first and last pages printed.
Seems to have captured everything.
Not everyone has DevonThink, but this shows it can be done, rather quickly and easily.
How to do it without DevonThink I don't know.
Korm?
Hey Mark,
I tried clipping the same page you did with DEVONthink Pro Office.
I then turned my network OFF and tried to run through all the postings on the page.
I found duplications and a failure to produce latter parts of the page.
How did you initiate the clipping? I did mine through the share menu.
-Chris
Initiated "Clip To DevonThink" bookmarklet in Firefox.
Screen print below.
I did not think to use Instapaper, but that might work even better.
I don't suggest anyone buy DevonThink just for this use.
But if DevonThink can do it, then certainly could be done another ways.
What was the purpose of turning off your network?
Hey Mark,
Because the Discourse forum software uses JavaScript to dynamically load about 20 posts at a time, therefore a webarchive will try to load from the web as you page through it – and you may see posts that actually don't show up in the webarchive itself.
-Chris