Printing directly from screen

pdrew · #1 (**permalink**) 02-21-2007, 12:10 PM

Hi!

Hope you can help someone who knows more about SEO than design.

I'm re-doing a site pro bono for a doctor who specializes in chemical injury. http://www.chemcialinjury.net. It's pro bono because someone in my family has been chemically injured and I'm helping to get word out on the latest treatment. The site provides information to doctors and patients. There is no sales angle. It was designed in FrontPage. I'm working in--yes, I know it's a WYSISYG editor--Net Objects Fusion. As I mentioned above, I'm not a designer, but I've done my SEO homework to get high rankings for my business' site.

The ChemicalInjury site had many links to word docs and PDFs. I'm making those word docs HTML web pages, so they get indexed and to make the site easy to manage. Also, many people don't want to download an unknown word document because it might contain a virus. I still have to re-work or create meta tags and titles for each page, too.

Many in the audience for this site are chemically injured/sensitive patients. They own older computers and aren't all that computer-savvy, either. We know from speaking with many patients that they like to print out information directly from what they see on their monitors. Very often they are housebound, and too sick and too fatigued to deal with learning how to download PDFs, copy and paste from the screen, locate a "printer-friendly" link, do a screen shot,etc. They just want to click "print" and make a hard copy.

Anyway, the site prints out just fine in Firefox. Do a print preview of the home page in Firefox and you'll see everything's within the margins. Not so in Internet Explorer. I'm using IE6. Do a print preview in IE6 and you'll see the right-hand inch or two of the content gets cut off. Would you take a look at the source code for the home page and see what's out of whack and provide the code required to adjust it to fit properly on the page when printing from the screen?

Please ignore the fact that Net Objects Fusion generates a lot of goofy code (which I know little about), there are probably too many nested tables, and the fact that the site is not very elegant from a design standpoint. It would be nice if I had the time and inclination to learn and design in CSS, etc. I'm simply trying to take what exists and make it useable. Eventually, I'm going to invest in Dreamweaver or another of the better WYSIWYGs, buy a good tutorial, and learn some HTML. Some day.

In the meantime, I appreciate any help or suggestions you might have. Thanks!

bj · #2 (**permalink**) 02-21-2007, 01:31 PM

I couldn't access the above address. I suspect the correct address is http://chemicalinjury.net

One of the things that might be affecting the printing is in the head of the document--

Code:

This is a poor conditional comment construction and could be throwing all MS programs into a tizzy. And since there is NOTHING within the conditional, I'm sure you can just erase the whole thing.

One thing that MIGHT work is to set a width of 780px on the main wrapping tables, and adjust the interior area widths from there. Then try printing.

arvana · #3 (**permalink**) 02-21-2007, 03:50 PM

Hi Peter,

I've never used Net Objects Fusion, so I don't know if you can edit the head tags, but if you can then one option (if bj's solution doesn't work) would be to create a separate media="print" CSS.

Code:

HTML:

<head>
...
<link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />
</head>


PRINT.CSS:

body {
  width: 6.25in;
  font-family: "times new roman", times, roman, serif;
  font-size: 12pt;
}

davebarnes · #4 (**permalink**) 02-22-2007, 12:02 AM

Quote:

"Many in the audience... own older computers and aren't all that computer-savvy...they like to print out information directly from what they see on their monitors....They just want to click "print" and make a hard copy."

Then, you need to learn how to really use CSS and create styles for both screen and print.

You also need to clean up the design.

Stop using NetObjects Fusion and learn how to Dreamweaver.

,dave

pdrew · #5 (**permalink**) 02-23-2007, 11:00 AM

Thank you BJ, Arvana, and Dave for taking the time to offer your assistance. I will give each a try and see if I can clean up the code and get the site to print out cleanly from Internet Explorer.

I had to laugh at myself, BJ. I proofread the whole post to make sure I spelled everything correctly and what do I miss? The correct spelling of the URL. Doh! Of course, the URL is www.chemicalinjury.net.

I'll try that bit of code, Arvana, and see what happens.

And, yes, Dave. You are correct, sir! Get the right tools and learn how to use them. Invest in Dreamweaver and a good tutorial on CSS. Does anyone have a recommendation on a good interactive tutorial on CD-ROM or DVD? I learn something like CSS or HTML better when I see it done.

Thanks again for your help. If anyone else who reads this thread has any ideas, I'd really appreciate your feedback, too.

bj · #6 (**permalink**) 02-23-2007, 11:13 AM

There are a lot of tutorials on the web, but a lot of beginners seem to struggle with the concepts when trying to learn this way.

I've been recommending beginners to LVS Online Learning with great results. It's 6 week course with a live instructor, lessons, and a great sensible lesson plan. They have beginner level courses on html, css, php and javascript, as well as other stuff. The instructors are very attentive, the classroom interaction on the password protected messageboards shows you how others arrive at the same results in different ways (which is great learning as well) and it's a thorough immersion in basic concepts.

Good luck!

arvana · #7 (**permalink**) 02-23-2007, 12:28 PM

If you'd like to save yourself some (not insignificant) cash, you can do quite well with some free HTML coding tools instead of Dreamweaver. The best one that I know of is Nvu, but there are a number of others as well, which you can find on CNet etc.

pdrew · #8 (**permalink**) 02-23-2007, 07:38 PM

Thanks for the suggestions regarding online learning and html editors! I'll give them a look. Have a great weekend.

drummin · #9 (**permalink**) 02-24-2007, 08:12 PM

Looks like your original question was regarding printing from your web page.

I use this all the time. Once you have these two "pages", you can add print to any section of text.
Make a page called, popup.js and use the following code.
function popup_print(printtable)
{
window.open('print.php?printtable='+printtable,'Pr int','width=600,height=710,toolbar=no, location=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,sc rollbars=yes,copyhistory=yes,resizable=yes')
}
***
You can change popup size but I've found this works great for printing.
***
Make a page called print.php and use the following code.
<?
$printtable=$_REQUEST['printtable'];
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE> Print Document </TITLE>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/printstyle.css">
</head>
<body>
<script>
document.write(window.opener.document.getElementBy Id("<?=$printtable;?>").innerHTML);
window.print();
</script>
</body>
</html>
***
As you can see, you can make style sheet for printing.
***
You will need to link to your js popup file on your main site pages. You can then surround any text to print with "printtable" id's. Here's a sample.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title></title>
<script src="js/popup.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<input type="button" name="print" value="Print" onclick="popup_print('printtable1')">
<div id="printtable1">Text on page.</div>
<input type="button" name="print" value="Print" onclick="popup_print('printtable2')">
<div id="printtable2">Text2 on page.</div>
</body>
</html>

pdrew · #10 (**permalink**) 02-25-2007, 12:03 PM

Thank you, Drummin, for the printing technique. I'll give it a try, along with the other suggestions from everyone else who was kind enough to respond to my question.

Best regards,

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