Save Page as PDF: Large page sizes and UserUnit?

strivingJuno

strivingJuno

I love Opera's feature of saving a web page as a custom format / single page PDF. This is just great for saving content in a readable form, as web pages are not usually designed to fit into pages. I work a lot with Jupyter notebooks. Again, page breaks generated by other HTML to PDF converters interfere much with readability.

However, there is one significant problem. Some PDF readers (notably Acrobat) have a size limitation for PDFs with custom page format. When I open the generated PDF file in Adobe Acrobat, the following error is reported:

The dimensions of this page are out-of-range. Page content might be truncated.

In my case, it truncates a considerable portion of the file (more than 50%)!

Question: How to recover from this?

Here's how far I've come. According to the PDF reference, the page size limit is:

The minimum page size should be 3 by 3 units in default user space; the maximum should be 14,400 by 14,400 units. In versions of PDF earlier than 1.6, the size of the default user space unit was fixed at 1 ⁄ 72 inch, yielding a minimum of approximately 0.04 by 0.04 inch and a maximum of 200 by 200 inches. Beginning with PDF 1.6, the size of the unit may be set on a page-by-page basis; the default remains at 1/ 72 inch.

Apparently, if a PDF exceeds 200 by 200 inches, it should set the \UserUnit attibute on a page-by-page basis. The attribute was added in PDF 1.6. Again from the reference:

(Optional; PDF 1.6) A positive number that shall give the size of default user space units, in multiples of 1 ⁄ 72 inch. The range of supported values shall be implementation-dependent. Default value: 1.0 (user space unit is 1 ⁄ 72 inch).

I see that that Opera creates PDFs of version 1.4. A fix would require to first upgrade to PDF 1.6 and then to set the \UserUnit. How can this be done?

It would be fantastic if the problem was solved within Opera, as it is not uncommon that a web page will be converted into large PDFs.

This problem has already been discussed elsewhere. For example: