Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Is the Printer Cutting You Off?

NOTE: The HTML2PDF tool is no longer a free tool.

Have you ever printed a web page, or helped a customer print a web page, in which the edge of the page was cut off? One work-around some staff have implemented is copying and pasting the web page into a Word document. This works but can be a bit clunky.

Well, the Librarian in Black passed on a useful site that I think will revolutionize our customer interactions in these scenarios. It is called HTML2PDF:

http://html2pdf.seven49.net/

That's right. Just enter the web address and click on "Render HTML to PDF Now!". You will then be asked if you want to Save or Open the file. You should select Open. And there it is! A PDF version of the web page.

This still does not solve the problem of printing web pages that are made of frames. You know what I am talking about. One of those pages where everything is divided into sections. You tell it to print and you end up with nothing or just the part of the page that was on the screen and nothing else.

Well, hopefully we will not have to deal with that much longer as web page developers are moving away from using frames. Follow this link to see what I think about frames. On this site, you see how printing is a fundamental problem with frames. So this is NOT OUR FAULT, folks.

If you need to print a web page made of frames, it is best to highlight the information needed, click on File > Print, and click on the Selection radio button.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

html2pdf may also be an option for saving web documents on the public PCs. When you cut and paste into WORD, for instance, some of the original formatting may be lost.

Anonymous said...

Nice blog you have here. I knew of that tool but had not thought to employ it in this way. Good idea!

I have set up an email alert to your very useful blog.

Hope

Anonymous said...

One word: screenshot...(or is it screen shot?)

I never knew how people created "pictures" of web sites and pasted them in Word documents, Power Point presentations, etc.
Now I know...

Anonymous said...

Ok, I may have jumped the gun on the whole screenshot thing (last comment). Once I saved my images as .jpeg they got blurry. I did a little research and learned that I could get a screenshot by pressing ALT + PRINT SCREEN. (PRINT SCREEN is the key to the immediate right of F12 on the keyboard--didn't know that either).

Wikipedia article on screenshot