51–60 of 67 posts
I've used WeasyPrint combined with custom templates in some web apps to get the job done. Worth looking into if this is a key part of what you are building.
One can zoom the page content, print only selected content, disable background pictures and color, print only main content (no menu bar), etc.
Interestingly enough, I tried out NCSA/Spyglass Mosaic v3 32-bit on Win7 and it already had almost the same print-preview features that are still available in IE (IE 1 emerged from Mosaic code base, IE up to v6 had "Mosaic" it in the copyright text in the about dialog).
Please browser vendors improve your print preview engine!
There is a CSS/HTML rendering engine for print, PrinceXML http://www.princexml.com/ - it is extremely good quality. It is not open source, but does fill a niche gap. If you need to produce quality pdf output from a single source it could be worth looking at. (its also interesting in that it is written in a functional logic programming language..., and that it is a small Australian startup)
The idea of printing a web page (particularly an article) does seem, in many ways, pointless. As others mentioned, it's a fundamentally different medium that strips out all of the things that make a web page compelling (linking, dynamicism, etc.) On the other hand, there's clear value in stripping out the ephemera and detritus around a work in order to concentrate more centrally on the work itself. While the idea of…
It's so much easier to browse through pages on the desk, the fit on 30 pages or so that I stapled together.
We have a little tool that can produce a multi-column print view (based on paper size and orientation) from most web-based articles. Chrome doesn't support multi-column CSS in its print view yet, so it doesn't work there. If anyone's curious, there's a video here: http://blog.fivefilters.org/post/75603097111/pdf-newspaper-2...
It's quit sad that Google favors broken CSS support in Chrome v32+ with their new "mobile 2014" strategy.
As a direct reaction too Google action, Apple remove ShadowDOM from Webkit.
There is a CSS/HTML rendering engine for print, PrinceXML http://www.princexml.com/ - it is extremely good quality. It is not open source, but does fill a niche gap. If you need to produce quality pdf output from a single source it could be worth looking at. (its also interesting in that it is written in a functional logic programming language..., and that it is a small Australian startup)
ConTeXt also provides an XML interface. Unlike PrinceXML, ConTeXt is open source. The community is quite friendly. I've been using it for a couple of years now to produce PDFs from a single source. In my case, I first transform the XML into ConTeX code using XSLT, a step that simpler systems might not require. http://wiki.contextgarden.net/XML
ConTeXt looks interesting though, I haven't really been following whats been going on for a while, looks interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> And that even before talking about protecting the nature from wasteful habits like this. Unfortunately, reading on paper is an order-of-magnitude better than reading on the screen. I have consistently noted that: 1. I absorb the material better when reading in printed form, not sure why. 2. My eyes strain less. 3. I find three times more typos (when proof-reading my own stuff), not sure why. 4. Annotating and high…
Part of this is because most web media is awful for reading. Column widths are standardized in print, magazine, and books for a reason: to minimize eye movement required. The larger that web screens get, the broader the column lengths often are, which forces more eye movement, which causes eye strain, which requires vision interruption, which impedes reading comprehension. Smart phones are great for short articles be…
Readability with paper is better even without columns though. Also, since I do majority of my work on big desktop screens, positioning with respect to the body also could be impacting. Using bigger fonts on-screen helps, though does not work out on many websites designed with small fonts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609711 I would find this message rather rude. I am interested in saving trees, but do not think technology offers me a solution yet. I print out of necessity.
Of course, this was a joke more than anything. Printing the web is fine when it is needed. I'm talking people going to a news website, printing the article, reading it and discarding the resulting paper afterward. Unless you need to annotate or use the printed articles in some of the ways you listed, you shouldn't be printing all the articles you see.
It still makes me suffer a lot though because optimizing for printing us clearly not the norm.
Also, I frequently cache articles by printing to PDFs not knowing a better way of capturing a static snapshot of a web page into a single file. I do not print these, but the resulting PDFs suffer from the same layout issues. Also, links do not get converted. (Several PDF software makers supply plugins for Microsoft Office, but almost none for web browsers.) I am happy to hear if someone has a better solution for this (other than using Internet archiving for such cashing).
Even if we all agreed to make sites printable you would never be happy with it. Right now certain CSS rules such as "float" can not be applied to print. This means you can not do any advanced layouts without totally redoing your HTML. It is far more important to have a site mobile compatible than print compatible which again will probably cause some HTML refactoring. So more websites are going to worry about being mo…
- That makes annotating and highlighting nearly as easy as with pen and paper
- Which also is not too expensive (Kindle DX pricing is fine, newly announced Sony's e-reader at $1000+ is not), and,
- Which supports easy transfer of content/URL to the device from within the firewall. (E.g. Virtual print driver that sends to the device and opens it there.)
Will be very happy to hear if there is a solution that I am not currently aware of!
The poor letter-spacing, or more accurately kerning, is that either the fonts in use don't have kerning pairs or they're being ignored, as web browsers seem to do. Printing from another typeface would solve the former, but in my experience (and not thoughtful research), kerning pairs are ignored in every browser. Firefox does give an effort, though, with automatic optical kerning, but it often crashes letters togethe…
I did notice that it was a lot worse on small font size, as the article did too, and it's really annoying: font are supposed to be scalable, why isn't there the same kerning errors on bigger sizes?