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by al_borland 162 days ago
I have to wonder if printing has gone down in popularity, in part, because so many websites handle it so poorly these days. I will sometimes "print" to PDF to save an article I want to read or reference, so I don't have to worry about the site disappearing on me. The quality of these PDFs has dropped dramatically over the years. With some sites it's almost not even worth it.
1 comments
shakna 162 days ago
On several of my previous projects I've been tasked with making the print broken, not just "disabled", to try and force people into the "happy path" where there's a download button. Despite the beforeprint event that would let me trigger the same process.

(I've argued and lost that fight, more often than won it.)

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al_borland 162 days ago
In these fights, did they give the justification for the download button? I'm continuously frustrated by these types of things that go out of their way to break native functionality. Is there a way where they can get extra information and tracking on the user; is that the goal?

To me the "happy path" is the one the user would naturally take, without needing to learn the quirks of each site.

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shakna 162 days ago
Well, not to entirely leak what I do but the justification is... Salesforce. [0] Omni-anything is a painful, overcomplicated, JS and DB intense process. Generating some PDFs can take in excess of thirty seconds, just because it hits five different objects. And can only be triggered by JS.

[0] https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ind.sf_contract...

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