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Printing Wide Web Pages?
dmayle asks: "I'm an origami folder, and I have some diagrams stored as web pages on a cd. I'd like to print them out (since folding in front of a computer monitor is not the easiest of tasks), but the web pages have all of the steps laid out horizontally. I've tried using Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, and even IE (on a windows platform), but I can't seem to find a printing engine that can handle wide web pages. Am I missing something? Hasn't anyone ever tried to print wide web pages before? What I'm asking is: Do you folks know of any utilities (or browsers) that I've missed that can handle printing wide web pages?"
Can't you just set the paper orientation to Landscape and click Print? What is so hard about that?
Hope that helps.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Can't the pictures just be downloaded seperately and then printed with a proper photo program?
Did ask Slashdot just become tech support?
Spencer Ogden
There is no such thing as "wide" web pages. HTML is a logical markup language. Your software renders pages however wide or narrow as it wants to. For example, if you have a graphical browser, you can resize Slashdot and the paragraphs widen or shink as necessary. Your printing software should be formatting the pages as appropriate for your printing preferences.
Why can't you just edit it and change the layout so the diagrams go down the page instead of across?
If you can't do HTML try one of the many WYSIWYG editors (Frontpage et al, bleurgh).
Otherwise, post links to the pages - it'd be pretty trivial to knock up a script to do it for you...
Why not just edit the HTML so the steps are laid out vertically?
Ok. I did, but didn't see what you're referring to. Do I have to use a special browser to recreate a bug that yours is experiencing?
...or are Ask Slashdot questions slowly degrading to crap?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Try turning your printer sideways - there were some monitors that could do this.
What about just using the landscape format?
Or a continuous feed printer in landscape mode, and the paper width set to the width of the page?
What the heck kind of Ask Slashdot post is this?
Open the html document in M$ word and set the margins appropriately. Then get it to scale down and print on one page.
OR
Open it the pictures in Paint Shop Pro (excelent program, free evaluation) and got to print set up and select landscape and fit to page
IE for mac has had really nice fit-to-page printing for a while now. Since 4.5 I think. I'll make sure paragraphs and images don't get cut off and such.
Dunno why the PC version, which is so much faster with a better DOM, is like the worstest ever at printing.
P.S. I love using "worstest".
Try printing with your printer set to "Landscape." If need be, you can get yourself an 11x17 printer.
-sid
How about doing a screen capture of your browser and printing the image with gimp or some other paint program?
... just buy a bigger monitor dude. Then it'll all fit on one screen. Trust me.
Just get a wider printer... HP has a nice 60" wide one!
This is the most pathetic response to an ask slashdot ever.
Like half of the people have suggested "landscape" when it's pretty obvious that's not what the guy is asking about. He's got a page that's like ten screens wide. Printing in landscape will give him maybe another half-a-screen of width. The question is: How to get the next eight screens of width?
The only thing I can think of on this one would be to somehow render the HTML page in PostScript (or eps). I don't know what out there would do that. Once you have PostScript, it should be pretty easy to make the printer do what you want, even if it means rotating it 90 degrees so it's on its side.
If someone could post a link to a nefarious page-widening post that would be cool, too. I can't see them anymore since I stopped using IE.
Could you import the data into software that would give you more flexibility? One of the reasons you can't find a browser that supports this kind of thing is that browsers are *browsers* and aren't really built for page layout of print media.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Save it as a PDF. Easier if you're in OS X but MS Word can probably do it as well. Then print landscape on a large format poster/banner printer.
Some Epsons and HP's can print unlimited length or very long 'banner' sized images on rolls of paper.
Take your PDF to Kinkos and have them do it for you.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Editing the HTML sounds like the best option to me. If its all layed out in tables just exchange some TDs with some TRs and it would work fine.
Too bad there isn't a built in way to do it though... But from a programming standpoint it doesn't seem like it should be too hard to in software just rotate the whole page 90 degrees and send it to the printer.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
A very nice tool for converting HTML to PDF is "HTMLDoc". It's GPL'ed. The HTMLDOC home page is located at http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc. It's not clear to me that it will really meet your needs, but if not, it may be possible to modify it to do what you want.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
- File -> Print Preview
- Click the radio button for "Print Wide Pages"
- There is no step 3. There is no step 3! =)
This will force the printer to tile out-of-bounds content in all directions, so that a web page 3 screens wide and 2 screens deep will print as:+---+---+---+
| 1 | 3 | 5 |
+---+---+---+
| 2 | 4 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
All this hinges on you having access to a Mac, of course. Can't really help you there. *cough*
This is a 3 step process and likely more than you were after. I suspect you were hoping for a, "Gee, just use this obscure browser parameter." instead. Anyway here goes:
1 - Print to a custom page size using a PDF writer or "print to file". I was able to print to an A3 size Postscript file just using Mozilla for Linux. I could also generate a custom page up to 45 inches wide using an old Adobe PDF writer under Windows. I was also able to scale the output to get much more on a page. The scaling trick will work quite well even to very small scales for text and lines but will not work for raster images. If you only have raster images then simply save them individually and print them from Gimp.
2 - Manipulate the file in a graphics application. A vector based application like Illustrator or Corel Draw will work best (sorry I don't do much drawing so I don't know the Linux equivalent - Sketch?, Kontour?) for rotating and scaling. I was also able to use Gimp to import my mozilla.ps file at a high res (600 dpi) and achieve acceptable results.
3 - Print the file at whatever scale, in whatever chunk configuration you like.
if you have acrobat installed you can just print to distiller of PDF maker and then you can size the pages accordingly in acrobat when you go to actually print the pages.
MoRe... LaTeR... -=PJK=-
One of the points of HTML is supposed to be that it does not care how wide the display device is. But I keep finding pages that are set up so that they can only be printed in landscape on US letter lest the text fall off the page. Poor design.
/. karma).
:o)
But to answer the question:
Use a printer driver for an A0 postscript plotter and print to file. I have exactly that set up, and can't see why it shouldn't work (but I am not going to print an A0 copy of goatse for
Hmmm... I just created an A0 poster of Theo de Raadt using IE... now there's a troll.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Oh yeah, it was only mentioned 5 TIMES! I could have asked this question in one sentence, 2 tops.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Easy, just stick a coupla A4 pages together with some masking tape and force them through the printer with a kitchen knife.
Alternatively, you could actually try using your brain to figure it out as opposed to asking such a totally lame question.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
It is not an issue unique to web pages. It is a potential issue for printing from any application.
Five years ago, when I was an avid user of Acorn RiscOS computers I had a neat applet which solves this problem for printing from any program. (I can't remember the name, and I have done a search).
What it did was to setup a virtual printer that could print arbitrary page sizes by printing tiles through a real printer.
The user would select what size paper they wished to emulate (A1, A0, etc or arbitrary dimensions), and the real printer to print through. The user would then press print from their application. The applet would create and print the tiles, with crop marks etc.
At the time I found the application quite useful, and found it easy to print out A2 or larger posters from any application, through my humble laser jet, and then paste them together.
I am quite surprised that there is no similar feature in CUPS, as IMHO, it would be relatively straight forward to implement, especially for GDI printers, and would be genuinely useful.
Klerck, can you chime in on this one?
Your rant interests me and I wish to use it in a sinewave scrolling demotext. May I assume it is copylefted or are you in fact not a smelly communist GNU hippy?
--
AC
That's what I do when having problems with Internet Explorer printing. You have to make sure to select optimize for compatibility in the properties.
This is just another variation on the suggestions offered by others. If you want to print at full size on a normal printer, you can print to postscript in the browser, then run the postscript through poster, which will break it into pages that you can print out and tape together.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Contrary to many posters, this is a good question. It is actually rather hard to do.
Of course, a web page is meant to be rendered in a browser and printing is a secondary consideration for most. Some material just has to be printed - for legal, archival purposes, for usefulness out on the shop floor by machine operators, etc.
I've encountered the problem often. The extremely wide web pages are typically generated by a database (for example, SAP (accounting) reports, HUD material) or converted spreadsheets.
HUD (US Housing and Urban Development agency) uses specific tags in their database generated web pages and a tool (HTML Scissors - http://www.faico.net/hscissor/) to split the pages up into printable chunks. The tool works, albeit the solution is imperfect.
The better solution that several have mentioned is to print to PDF and manipulate that. If you have Adobe Acrobat (the Writer) or Distiller, that works.
The last is to import into some HTML editor and reformat it. This requires the most effort, and, if the material is many columns of numbers, can be difficult to see if you've bolixed something up.
Other than the Mac IE print to fit feature, I have not found a simple solution - and would like to myself.
-- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.
Please punctuate! I mean, really, you're going to complain about loose/lose and the confusion of there/their/they're, but you can't be bother to include a period in your post?