Guide: View Entire Topic on One Page or Export Topic Content

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Want to get a whole topic into a browser window or document instead of using the standard infinite scrolling with autoloading? That can help with searching, skimming or archiving the text. Here are two options:

Printable Page

You can press cmd-p (mac) or ctrl-p (windows) to bring up a printable page in a simplified format. Just close the print dialog and the page should still be there, fully loaded and readable in your browser.

You can also print to pdf (at least on mac; I’m not familiar with windows options). And once you have the page in your browser, you can export to pdf, save as html or web archive, view source, copy/paste, etc.

I’m told this displays up to 1000 posts per page. If a topic had more than that, you might be able to print multiple pages to pdf to get everything. (I don’t have a long enough topic to test it.)

Print Page URL Construction

You can also get the print-formatted page by constructing a url.

Example topic:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-shares-links-2022/464/10

The parts of the url are separated with slashes. After the topic name you will see one or two numbers. The first is the topic id and the second, if present, is the post number within the topic. Make this url:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-shares-links-2022/464/print

It’s “print” after the topic id number, with no post number.

If a topic has more than 1000 posts, you can add a page parameter to the url to get later pages. You can get multiple documents that way and combine them yourself. Example:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-shares-links-2022/464/print?page=2

(That will give an error because there aren’t enough posts, but it should work if a topic has over 1000 posts.)

Markdown Post Exporting

You can get a page with markdown-formatted posts using URL construction.

Example topic:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-shares-links-2022/464/10

The parts of the url are separated with slashes. After the topic name you will see one or two numbers. The first is the topic id and the second, if present, is the post number within the topic. Make this url:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/raw/464

It’s “raw” then the topic id without the “t”, topic name or post number.

It’s paginated with 100 posts per page. To get later pages do:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/raw/464?page=2

In this case, the topic is quite long, so there are 3 pages, which you could combine in a text editor to get one document. (Post numbers go up to 243 but some posts were moved to other topics, so the first page contains 100 posts and goes up to #119.)

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There is a plugin to add a visible “print” button in the UI so you don’t need to know the hotkey or do URL construction. I am saving it here in case I want to install it in the future:

But I think it’s unnecessary so I won’t install it now.

Also I got info from:

And I asked about this at:

PS You can pick “print” from a menu (“file” menu on mac), and then print to pdf, but it doesn’t bring up the print-formatted page the way using the hotkey does.

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Using the command line, you can quickly get and combine multiple markdown pages. Example:

Create an empty folder and navigate to it:

mkdir md-dl; cd md-dl

Download all 3 pages:

wget https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/raw/464\?page\={1..3}

Combine:

cat 464* > combined.md

Downloading extra pages is OK; they just end up blank. But I think the pages will end up out of order if there are more than 9 because, in alphabetical order, 10 comes before 2.

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