Here I am, the day before Thanksgiving, preparing for a few relaxing days off and Mac 911 forum visitor PeterG posts a question that drives me nuts. He writes:
I wanted to print my addresses (.Mac) but all I get is Apple’s navigation icons and the Icon and Address Book. No addresses at all. It’s just not seeing them. I can see them. Won’t even save in Print ->PDF, then print out.I opened my Address Book and printed whatever I wanted. Went back to .Mac and nothing. I printed out an e-mail from .Mac. So it works.
Deleted all addresses (.Mac) then synced again, nothing.
To bring you up to speed, a .Mac Address Book page is jiggered in such a way that entries don’t print—either when sent directly to a printer or when saved as a PDF from within the Print dialog box and then printed. As Peter suggests, you get a printout that includes the usual Apple tabs at the top of the page and a large .Mac icon next to the words “Address Book,” but nothing else. This is a problem universal to every browser I tried—Safari, Firefox, even a copy of Windows XP’s Internet Explorer 6.0.2 running under Parallels.
Nothing.
Rob Griffiths suggested getting the text into TextEdit. Selecting the text and using the Services -> New Window Containing Selection command does the job and, when the document is saved as Rich Text, all the contacts’ email addresses become live links, which is very handy. If you want to print out a less showy directory of your contacts, convert it to a plain text file.
Another option suggested by both forum vets macnuke and dougster was to take a screenshot (or two if the page is too long to capture on your monitor) and print it out.
Here’s my answer:
Saft.
Saft is a $12 Safari enhancer plug-in from Hao Li that makes Safari a powerhouse in a variety of ways—draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, searchable bookmarks and history, URL shortcuts, kiosk mode, ad blocking, and on and on.
For our purposes the one really cool thing it does is add an Export PDF command to Safari’s contextual menu. Unlike the PDF button in Safari’s Print dialog box, which does bupkis when it comes to including a .Mac address book’s contacts, Saft’s Export PDF command makes the magic happen. Choose the command, open the resulting PDF file, and gasp when you see the entire contents of the address book page before your eyes.
But, as I’ve said before, I like free and Saft, worth-every-cent though it may be, is 12 bucks more than free. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, check out this thread.