Re: Printing HTML
Peter Flynn (pflynn@imbolc.ucc.ie)
25 Sep 1997 22:33:32 +0100
Date: 25 Sep 1997 22:33:32 +0100
From: Peter Flynn <pflynn@imbolc.ucc.ie>
In-reply-to:
To: www-html@w3.org
Cc: baruch@mercury.co.il
Message-id: <199709252133.WAA05327@imbolc.ucc.ie>
Subject: Re: Printing HTML
>From: baruch@mercury.co.il [SMTP:baruch@mercury.co.il]
>I have just read an article of yours that you posted earlier this month
>about printing HTML. It seems that you are an expert in HTML.
>I have a question regarding printing in HTML, and I was hoping that you
>could help me:
>
>I would like to add a button to an HTML document. The button would say
>simply "Print this page".
>When the user clicks this button, the current web page would be printed.
Why bother when the browser already provides a button labelled "Print"?
Erik replied:
Problem is, that simple request almost impossible!
You could perform the button-detection with an inline script.
In order to achieve an acceptable printout,
you need to write a program that converts the web page into EPS or RTF.
But as you say, you'd need to ship a whopping app to do the printing.
Currently, most browsers will do a poor job of laying out your HTML
page,
and don't provide the ability to hide forms from a printout, add
footers, draw table headers, etc.
See my paper to SGML'95 on this topic [1]. Plus ca change, plus c'est
la meme chose.
///Peter
[1] Flynn, P. Making More Use of Markup. SGML'95 Conference
Proceedings, GCA, Alexandria VA, Dec 1995.
(http://imbolc.ucc.ie/~pflynn/articles/moreuse.html)