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Referencing aircraft for sale advertisements - planecheck

The problem with linking to an advert in a discussion is that fairly soon that link will be dead.

In the past, if there is a thread dedicated to a specific advert then I try to freeze it, by printing off a PDF and dropping that into the thread.

But this is way too much work for me to do more generally. Especially as – probably by design – some of the popular websites don’t “print” and one just gets garbage so I have to take screenshots and combine these into a PDF.

I can’t think of a solution, however. Maybe someone has an idea?

Maybe someone much more clever than I can knock up a windoze prog which takes an advert URL (supporting the 2 or 3 common sites) and squirts out a PDF

I was just going to suggest that people referencing aircraft for sale drop in perhaps 1 line (underneath the URL) describing what the advert is about, in the context.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something/

It doesn’t work for planecheck unfortunately.

Last Edited by Rwy20 at 04 Feb 18:09

That would be a cunning approach

Unfortunately their storage policies are very patchy, to say the least.

If I can get a PDF, I can drop it in. Or perhaps one day such a feature, once working, could be incorporated into the EuroGA website, if it is written in some script language. I have the Ruby runtime on my PCs here; the challenge is finding somebody who knows Ruby.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

This works:

Screenshot

or PDF

Is it possible to upload pdf from mobile?

always learning
LO__, Austria

You cannot drag/drop on any device on which every app is full-screen (obviously) but the Upload Image button should work, for a PDF too. Make sure it is enabled in your Preferences.

A PDF is better than an image to upload, because it forms a clickable link, while an image is huge.

Note also that any thread whose first post contains a large graphic cannot be promoted (an activity I do once or twice a day, manually) to have a banner on the home page, so a lot of people will miss it.

Screenshots are a problem because most adverts take up more than 1 screen’s worth. There are screenshot utilities which permit scrolling while defining the region boundaries but then you get a huuuuuge image.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Can’t a simple script automatically create a pdf print out of a -link? you could query preexisting files prior creating data for spam/volume protection.

mh
Aufwind GmbH
EKPB, Germany

Pdf Test

Safari_04_02_2019_20_13_pdf

Successful – using image upload (where it says only jpg/png/gif files are allowed).

Last Edited by Snoopy at 04 Feb 21:10
always learning
LO__, Austria

You missed this

Yes, the text labels ought to be updated to say PDF is OK now too. One day when I find someone to get into the Ruby code, this will be fixed.

Can’t a simple script automatically create a pdf print out of a -link? you could query preexisting files prior creating data for spam/volume protection

Yes, possible, but a big back door for exploits/hacking (if it is to work from any URL, and run on the EuroGA server). Also, the sort of PDF generator I am referring to would need to be specially tailored to the aircraft advert sites, because “printing” from them doesn’t work well. For example a straight Print in Chrome from Planecheck gives you this

Printing from websites (if you want a half decent result) is a big topic; few website developers understand it and few care “because nobody prints anymore”. The general position has been that the print width is set from the width of the widest graphic on the page, but various factors complicate this.

Snoopy – how did you generate that PDF?

I have just heard there is a unix tool out there which makes a PDF from HTML…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

That was just a couple of clicks with a Chrome Extension. There are loads, mostly not great; that one was “Full Page Screen Capture”.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom
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