[thelist] Drop down menus w/o layers & Printable pages

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Biddy

To be able to cleanly produce printable versions of pages
(like the evolt site has) you need to do 2 things:
1) Make sure the colours & fonts are simple, high-contrast,
   printable fonts (specified in pt, not px). CSS will pretty robustly
   achieve this for you, if you can ensure that the user is delivered
   the right stylesheet, which will usually involve a server-side
   solution.
2) Remove navigation which is redundant in the print version -
   the main non-content info you need is enough to identify the
   place it's been printed from (ie a logo or some such) and a link
   to get back to the on-screen version. CSS won't robustly do this
   for you (it can do it, but only for high-end browsers). You'll need
   to do this server-side.

(you can also do nice things like add a URL citation after each
link, but that's a really fun and interesting challenge)

What both requirements imply is a separation between content
and presentation layers, and yes, a db/template system like ASP
or ColdFusion (which is what the evolt site runs on) will do this for you.

However, it's not absolutely necessary to run a db-backed site.
Apache's XSSI can also achieve print templating for you, as it
has conditionality capabilities. Take a look at
http://www.easyweb.co.uk/cv/cv.html
http://www.easyweb.co.uk/cv/cv.html?printable
which is all run with XSSI, looking for a querystring of 'printable',
and doing if/then/else conditionality.

When I get a moment, I'll write a tutorial on it, but if you look back
in the list archives, I quoted the vital code in answer to a question
about swapping stylesheets yesterday.

Cheers
Martin




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Subject:  [thelist] Drop down menus w/o layers & Printable pages




Also, we're designing the site to 600x800 dimensions....and we must provide
a printable page...  I understand that there is a tag/piece of code that can
just pull the data out of the page when the visitor hits the print icon -
i.e. it prints the page content instead of cutting off the page content at
the 640 mark....  Is anyone familiar with this?

I hear that this is only possible if the content is already in a database,
and it is already being pulled out and placed into a template page, like an
ASP website. Is this true?



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