Issue Reading New Digital Viewer

Maybe as it is a demo you can't get a good print, does not get as far a sprinting for me either but shows the option is available.

I may have been wrong but did not think PM had a print option.I don't use it much.

There is a 'Print' icon on the right hand side of the Pocket Mags viewer, when this is selected it gives you thumbnails of all the pages, and you can select 2 to print.

Just to throw something else into the mix .... The MTM Digital T&C's state that a Flash viewer will be used ..... This is not now the case so they have breached their own T&C's.Subscribers should have been told of the change of the T&C's and given the option to terminate their subscription with full refunds if they do not accept.

MTM need to fix this quickly and back-apply it to issues already published with the new downgraded viewer!

Dave

Can't win. People were complaining they could not view with Flash now you start moaning when flash is removed

Not quite true .... We are moaning that the PRINT functionality has been removed.

Dave

To top it off PocketMags have updated the web viewer that allows you to read the digital editions on any computer.

In the upgrade they have broken the print option when using the Chrome browser.

Peter

Actually, people have been moaning about the flash viewer for several years. rather more than are moaning about the lack of print. Which will hopefully be fixed.

Neil

Not "people" but rather the "terminally paranoid" who either could not, or refused to, use flash safely despite being shown how to do so in this forum many times.

Well, whatever the reason, support for flash is ending, so we have to move one anyway.

Neil

Just to explain where I'm coming from:

The Flash version always worked well for me but I let my subscription lapse a year or two ago .... for health reasons I couldn't get the time to spend. Coincidentally, I had just decided that the time was ripe to take out a new subscription when this thread started up and I realised the earlier Flash version was being dropped.

That (the renewal) is on hold now, until the situation resolves itself one way or the other - trouble is I don't want to pay the money to find out if it works as well as it used to.

Fair enough.

I think the old flash versions will remain as they are.

Neil

Those are interesting comments taken together. Doesn't that mean that if support for Flash ends (in browsers) the earlier, back-issues, won't be readable?

... or am I misunderstanding?

No, it chiefly means that any security vulnerabilities won't get addressed by updates to the software and future browsers are less and less likely to support flash without a legacy plugin.

Neil

Which means the archives will be unavailable to most people who keep their software up to date. Google removed Java support from Chrome several years ago as part of security updates, you cannot install the Java plugin for Chrome and run Java plugins. Yes, today Java is still used on websites, but that is running Java on the server.

Firefox changed their plugin method about 18 months ago. They provided about 6 months ability to run legacy plugins. If the plugins were not rewritten they stopped working.

That is the future of Flash it will die and we will not be able to access the archives.

Surely, after they get the new viewer working someone can find a script on the web to convert from flash to the new viewer. Certainly there will be one to convert to HTML5, the Java replacement.

Withthe PocketMags viewer I have had an email confirming that the is a bug in the current release preventing printing when using Chrome, the bug is confirmed. They are working to fix the printing bug.

Peter

I can confirm that the print function on Pocketmags is working on Firefox

JES

Ive just tried the print function on the Pocketmags web site using Chrome and I've had no problems printing pages from the current ME and MEW magazines. I am using a PC running Win 10

Mickyt

Yes, I agree Pocket Mags have fixed the issue with Chrome.

Now teh new archive viewer needs to be fixed.

Peter

Hi Neil

I have just been trying to read the latest issues of ME and MEW with great difficulty the new format is not an improvement , I cant print a page. On occasion when turning a page the right hand page disappears I have sometimes lost the hole mag to retrieve it I had to go back to square one. The only way to read a page is to zoom in any printing before that is blur .

Is this the shape of things to come?

Not being able to print is a big issue for me especially from back issues.

Hello Donald,

As I've posted above we are looking into ways of enabling rpinting.

Neil

I hope the outlook isn't that grim!

Flash is just one way of delivering content stored on a server and displaying it on a client. There are several alternatives. It's unlikely that the archives are stored in a special Flash proprietary format that can't possibly be delivered to a client by anything else. More likely, the source documents are standard file types that most packages can read.

It is true that moving from one reader to another isn't always glitch free! The chief danger is that someone was persuaded in the past to archive magazines produced by long obsolete software in a non-portable way. Such can be difficult to disentangle.

The demise of Flash is a good thing - although it met a real need, the software was designed before security was well understood, and then programmed naively with little concern for security. Over several years it became apparent Flash was built on sand. It turned out to be difficult and expensive to retrofit security without breaking functionality and the product was involved in multiple security incidents. An analogy would be building a bungalow and then trying to convert it to secure £100M in cash. You can't just put a few bars on the windows and fit a B&Q burglar alarm...

At the same time industry learned a lot from Flash and other security experiences, and its replacements are more functional, performant, and trustworthy.

On the other hand, when it comes to upgrading software, we all know " if something can go wrong, it will!"

Dave

Not seen it mentioned, but I often simply take a screen shot of anything I want to save. I can print from there if necessary. Don't know how it might affect other attributes, but generally works for me.