[thelist] Printing Standard Pages from Web Site

jay.blanchard at thermon.com jay.blanchard at thermon.com
Tue Oct 23 11:31:51 CDT 2001


Hail All Wise & Wonderful Web Gurus!

We have an ongoing 'tiff' here at the ranch that I am hoping that maybe the 
collective brain trust can help me solve. It would be a valuable tool for many.

As has been discussed before here, CSS can be used to create various 
versions of a page, for instance one for display and one for print. Each 
version can be customized various ways, but there are some around here that 
want the page to print as if it were coming out of M$ Word or Adobe ...nice 
8.5" x 11" pages that don't have a line wiped out at the bottom, don't have 
columns, etc.. I have explained until I am blue in the face how printing 
from a web page is not the same as printing from a document. I don't want 
to have to create dual versions of the materials to facilitate this. Has 
anyone created a CSS for printing that will take a single web page and 
compress it so that it neatly fits on 8.5 x 11 printed pages? I have made 
many attempts, but to no avail. The problem, as we all know, is that a web 
page may exceed the logical limits of a printed page (number of lines) even 
if you get rid of nav stuff, graphics, etc.. I am beginning to think that I 
will have to create a text document having no columns that I cut and paste 
from the newsletter section (where the most complaints come from) of our 
site and print it out for those who don't get it.

The real $h!t of this deal is that we are launching a new Intranet site 
within the next few months and I am sure that this will come up yet again 
even though the format will be different. I guess I could limit the number 
of lines per page programatically.

Signed,

Hair Pulling in Texas

<tip>How many of you make flow charts anymore? While most web work is not 
programming in the traditional sense a flow chart can still help your 
customer to better understand navigational issues and other decision making 
processes that a site visitor might go through. The tool of choice for most 
is Visio (which now belongs to the Empire) although any block diagram tool 
will work.</tip>





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