Is a refund in order

[Robert GarrettParticipant @robertgarrett93721]

Hi,

I was looking at getting several back issues at the Sandown show, it seemed to be a better idea to get a digital subscription, that way I would get this back issues I wanted, this years issues and one other benfit seemed to be being able to tidy up a bit and get rid of all the paper copies I have laying around.

The trial copy did not work for me so I subscribed anyway, I seriously wish I hadn’t, it was the quickest waste of £30 I have ever done, I really cannot believe that I am not allowed to download them and view them offline, also the printing is terrible one page at a time etc, I seriously would like to know if I am entitled to a refund as I will not be using it.

 

Regards,

Bob Garrett

[Robert GarrettParticipant @robertgarrett93721]

[Oil MagnetParticipant @oilmagnet]

Hi Robert,

I took my first digital subscription last year and found the same frustration you are having.

My solution was to buy Office 2007 ( more expense I know ! ).As I type play.com are sellng for £45. This allows you to ‘print ‘ to a virtual printer which is actually a file in a programme called One note.This programme allows you to create your own library of articles for future reference off line.You can also convert to PDF files if you wish.

For some reason it doesnt work with chrome (possibly a driver issue ) but its fine with I.E.

 

Regards OM.

 

[Les Jones 1Participant @lesjones1]

Hi Bob,

I can understand your disappointment. I subscribe to the electronic version of the “EPE” magazine which IS a PDF download every month. This is very convenient as you can search the online index and go straight to the issue containing the article you require. The quality of this is also much better than the sample versions of “ME” and “MEW” I was going to suggest using “Primo PDF” which is a virtual printer that creates a PDF document but I just tried it and it does not work with “ME” and “MEW” (You could do a search for “virtual printer driver” to see if you can find a free one that works. The only way I found to create a PDF was to press the “print screen” key (With the display of the page you want as large as possible) then open a photo editing program. (I used “Paintshop pro”) Select edit and choose “paste as new image”. You can then crop the screen capture and save it to “Primo PDF” virtual printer. This has the option to append to an existing file so you could save all the pages for the article you want as a single PDF file.

 

Les.

[keithmartParticipant @keithmart]

Hi

the pdf printer that I use is dopdf which is free.

You are still restricted to one page at a time though, so I use another free program pdfsam which will join them all together again.

One magazine takes me under 30 minutes to convert.

Regards

Keith

Leeds UK

[dcostaParticipant @dcosta]

Hello.

 

There’s a freeware product called Foxit (PDF reader) that installs a fake printer whose

destination is a PDF file.

My version is a little old and I’m not sure the newest version also creates this fake printer.

You can find it here: http://foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/

I have just experimented with printing a page to this fake printer and then view it with the PDF viewer and it seems to me as having a good quality.

 

Hope it helps You not expending some £.

 

Dias Costa

Edited By dcosta on 02/01/2012 10:05:32

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I’ve always saved any pages from the digital issues into the Microsoft XPS Document Writer, which is in my Vista OS, that I wanted, which can be viewed or printed whenever I require. This morning I have downloaded the pdf printer that Keith has mentioned, and I have printed page 47 from MEW 184 with both the PDF and the XPS document writers on my Cannon PIXMA IP1000 with the same preferences, and cannot see any difference in the quality between the two, however, while the XPS document writer prints the page to the same width but a little shorter than the magazine page, the PDF writer prints the page less than the width than the magazine and shorter still than the XPS writer.

 

They were both printed onto A4 paper, and the resulting overall print area aspect ratios are 1.4375 for the PDF writer, and 1.467 for the XPS writer, as opposed to 1.5 for the magazine. The respective print area sizes, which includes the date ect. at the bottom of the page are; PDF 258 X 176, XPS 267 X 182 and 273 X 182 for the magazine. (not precision measurements) I’d say that although the PDF print is smaller both ways, it is probably a closer match to keeping the aspect ratio the same as the magazine. Weather the length on the XPS was restricted due to the permissible margins on an A4 page, I don’t know, I may try them both again on my A3 printer when I get my desk top system set up again.

 

regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 02/01/2012 12:47:01

[macmarchParticipant @macmarch]

I use Primo.pdf to download and it works fine. It is a tad slow but you do get the quality back. I do agree with others and wonder why the mags are not put up as pdf files. Every other magazine that I have an interest in uses pdf.

Les, How do you merge several pages together? I can’t find a way in Primo or its brother Nitro.

 

 

[Gone AwayParticipant @goneaway]

“In The Beginning” the online reader allowed printing of the whole issue in one go. This was convenient since it allowed conversion to pdf with one of the many available methods with the minimum of effort.

 

Most people who did this decided that “discretion was the better part of valour” so to speak but a few, who felt they had made a tremendous discovery, couldn’t resist telling the world how clever they had been. Shortly afterwards, MHS implemented a new reader with printing crippled to one page at a time – which is much less convenient.

 

Considering the paranoia MHS has shown vis-a-vis versions of the digital files showing up on eBay and other places, repeated discussion (and this topic has been done to death several times in these forums) seems more likely to result in suspension of printing facilities altogether (as in the case of some other magazines … e.g. the village press stable) rather than a move towards those magazines that are actively pdf based.

[Les Jones 1Participant @lesjones1]

Hi Ray,

Save the first page as normal to a file. (eg Magazine.pdf) When you save subsequent pages give them the SAME file name. Primo PDF will then ask overwrite / append. Choose append.

 

Les.

[macmarchParticipant @macmarch]

Thanks Les. I knew there had to be an easy ‘fiddle’ should have read your post more closely. btw I have just run a download by printing this page, select primo.pdf as the printer, wait a little for primo to get hold of it and download, wait a little longer for primo to pass it to nitro which will then save it as a pdf file. The waiting is only about 20 seconds but most of that is down to my AVG checking everything.

 

Just downloaded, installed and run pdfsam. Great but only 2 pages with sample across each page unless I buy for $49.95. Not bad for a site that says free.

 

Happy new year to all.

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

A third vote for Primo pdf here.

 

Neil

[TerrydParticipant @terryd72465]

Hi Les,

 

PDFSam is free. What you have dowloaded is ‘Mergepdf’ which is a paid for advert on the PDFSAM site. To download PDFSAM you must click on the ‘download’ tab at the top of the page and choose your download.

 

Regards

 

Terry

[TSHParticipant @tsh73987]

 

Some time ago I was a happy user of PrimoPDF but inexplicably it stopped working on my computer (for all documents).

Since then I have used an alternative called PDFcreator which also allows building of multiple pages in a single pdf file. This works fine for me on Vista.

 

Happy New Year to all.

 

Trevor

[Author]

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