Home / Opera ‘save as pdf’ produces one single large page pdf: how to work with those?

Started noticing issues when viewing pdf files saved from web pages with the internal Opera ‘save as pdf’. An example file is mostly text, a few small icon pictures, maybe 15 ‘pages’, and total file size about 1.6 MB. Rendering was very slow (20 seconds) and then moving further down in the document took more (maybe 20 seconds) to render. Moving back up to top needed another re-render.

So despite sumatrapdf eventually rendering it in a readable form (very well by the way), and it appearing that we can page-scroll through it, the document is really a very long and very narrow 1 page document, and is very slow to page through (probably the document’s fault). I guess this is understandable.

I wouldn’t think that I am the first to encounter this type of pdf from Opera, nor will be the last, so I am just wondering if people have suggestions for how to deal with these pdf documents… perhaps how to re-process the document into the 20 or so paper-sized pages, print the document expanded to fit the width of paper (instead of one narrow line down the middle of one page), etc… I understand that the paper page boundaries will not match any of the logical boundaries of the document. The trick would be something like ‘fit width to physical paper’.

When I open the document and try to print with a variety of software, they all say that the document is 1 page, so can’t split it up that way. Acrobat DC says ‘dimensions of this page are out-of-range…’

Anyhow, this might seem to be unexpected behavior, or a performance issue. Other people might ask this in the future, so I thought I’d post this now and see if there are any suggestions or discussion on how to work with these strange documents.

Thanks for the great software…

John Refling

As you see from the Adobe comment ‘dimensions of this page are out-of-range…’ these enlarged shapes push the boundaries of expected PDF page sizes.

I downloaded and tried this feature in OperaPortable, It is easy to use and great for some cases (I can fit the SumatraPDF page as one great big wide poster) but its not easy to control the output page size so should as you know be avoided especially for long Web Pages (within reason wider is less of a problem)

I would normally for a Web Page either live online in the browser or stored as htm/pdf offline in a browser/viewer, resort to print to PDF where you can usually vary the margins and scale a few percent to often achieve good page breaks.

There are few free editors that may be able to split / cut / paste a PDF into Pages but I have no Idea which one to try for breaking a large object into rectangular pieces at given boundaries (offhand as a wild guess, I think Inkscape might be worth checking) but see my editor recommendation below.

Generally I will print to PDF pages from the browser at the time of first viewing so as to get best fit

What can be done using only SumatraPDF
It is partially limited since “Print selection to PDF” will produce image PDF’s rather than searchable ones (you could try version 3.0 with print as image off to see if its different) however I strongly recommend that it would be much easier using “Print to Pdf pages” in Opera with the source page.

Here is a long web page where I have already printed the upper selection and I am now printing the lower selected section as images

This produces two PDF pages which I can then combine & merge using SumatraPDF pre-release “New bookmarks” functions. It serves as Proof of Concept however, it would be unwieldy enough for manually splitting many pages to be avoided if possible.

This is the type of situation where using a very low cost PDF editor (a couple of $ per month) with a bookmarks wizard, when combined with SumatraPDF as the previewer, is much easier to crop into searchable pages for a perfect result.