How best to archive a fanfic (and its comments) before I delete it?

September 8, 2020 9:53 AM

I'm going to be deleting some older fanfic from AO3*** and I'd like to make an archive of not only the fic itself, but also all of the comments. What are the easiest/cleanest ways to do this?

The big complicating factor here is that most of these fics have multiple pages of comments, and so I can't easily just print it all to PDF. (Is there a way to have AO3 display all comments on one page?) There are also a large number of fics, so finding a quick simple process is a big priority.

The archive doesn't need to be interactive in any way, just readable. The absolute ideal would be something I could get printed and bound For Memories.

**In this case, orphaning the works isn't an option, I do actually need to delete them entirely.

posted by Sometimes you need a little space to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You can use your web browser to save your stories as HTML. Looks like you want to show the full work with comments using the following flags in your URL:

?show_comments=true&view_adult=true&view_full_work=true#comments

And then you get one very long page, which you can save as HTML. Your browser will save it as a .html file and a folder containing any linked images. The HTML file will have links to the folder for the images, but outside links should be preserved.

Once it's HTML, you have it in a kind of original version, and later you can find some way to convert HTML to PDF.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:14 AM on September 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

To add on to Sunburnt's answer, IF you can manage to get the whole story plus comments on a single page in your browser, you should be able to save to PDF by bringing up the Print dialogue box as though you're going to print it, then clicking the PDF button.

(I know for sure you can do this on Mac, haven't tried Windows but I'm almost sure it works similarly.)
posted by mekily at 10:24 AM on September 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

You can indeed do it on Windows. Windows has a virtual printer that can do XPS (which is Microsoft's answer to PDF) or PDF itself.

However, PDF is the least-flexible format-- it forces everything into a specific page format. I would recommend .epub or .mobi, both of which are electronic book formats, in addition to archiving the HTML (and files) somewhere. Epub and Mobi both support chapters, inserted pictures, section/page beaks, etc. They can easily be converted into each other or PDF (which will respect your page breaks as well).
posted by Sunburnt at 11:13 AM on September 8, 2020

You might want to look into user-generated scripts or skins for this although none come to mind, unfortunately.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 12:21 PM on September 8, 2020

Response by poster: Sunburnt -- Unfortunately, while that trick does show you the entire work, it still only displays the first page of comments. I did a quick test export to webarchive, and that also only captures the first page of comments.

This comment display issue is my main problem here, honestly. Once I have that sorted out, exporting to PDF or an ebook format is straightforward enough.

Thank you!!
posted by Sometimes you need a little space at 12:45 PM on September 8, 2020

If you're talking about a remotely manageable number, I'd probably go through and save each page of comments separately...then you can concatenate manually, either as PDF or HTML. A pain in the butt, yes, but thus is the web.
posted by nosila at 2:13 PM on September 8, 2020