Discuss: Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!

by Håkon Wium Lie, Bert Bos

11 Re: HTML and CSS, two of our favorite acronyms

A response to Abdelrahman Osama’s post about abbreviations and acronyms. I believe you are right, and as far as I get it – and here it goes – the difference is that an acronym is an pronounceable abbreviation (an abbreviation which forms out a word), whereas an abbreviation is just one or more letters taken from one or several words.

Acronyms: MODEM, LASER
Abbreviations: CSS, HTML, IBM

And now to the article =) :
As said before by several persons, I do too believe that HTML+CSS (yet ;)) can solve all the problems, but this is a great solution for printable (web) articles, tutorials, and the like that do span several pages. Including “books” that’s been published to the web.

And it’s fun to watch CSS maturing and showing off some muscles in different terretories.

posted at 11:44 am on November 29, 2005 by Michael Odden

12 The ultimate print style sheet

I think that the people who have criticised XHTML / CSS as not being ready for styling a printed book have a valid point. This article shows that XHTML / CSS are not yet up there with dedicated tools such as LaTeX. But the sample markup and style sheet may well be the best-written print style ever written to date!

I’m guessing that almost all of the CSS magic used in the sample is already supported by cutting-edge browsers such as Firefox. If browsers were able to output to print as well as Prince can – and they’re really not that far off – this would basically eliminate the barrier between web and print altogether. My biggest concern is that they had to use so much print-specific markup, such as specialised classes, in order to achieve the desired output.

posted at 01:41 pm on November 29, 2005 by Jeremy Epstein

13 Interesting potential

No, this technique is nowhere close to replacing an experienced print designer; nor is it going to replace proper pre-press preparation for “real�? print jobs. I see it, however, giving opportunities in our blog-happy nation to provide automated PDF versions of constantly updated content. One conceivably could print out a customized date range of some news or blog-oriented site with headers, an index/TOC and page numbers. It would make for catching up on favorite Websites that much easier when I’m riding the train in to work.

posted at 02:58 pm on November 29, 2005 by John Lascurettes

14 Good Overview

While I agree with the many who have commented before I have (that CSS really isn’t capable of all the details needed to create an arbitrarily styled book), I found this to be a great primer on getting your web pages to the print medium. It’s much more accessible than the W3C guidelines.

Thanks for it!

posted at 03:24 pm on November 29, 2005 by CM Harrington

15 Keep in Mind PDF Accessibility

If you want to make [url=”/articles/pdf_accessibility/”]accessible PDFs[/url] for online reading, you need a tool that, unlike the current version of Prince, converts your HTML markup to PDF tags. I’ve seen a lot of interesting PDF generation tools that fail to take advantage of PDF tags. Maybe the feature is hard to implement, but until Prince produces tagged PDFs, I’ll have to stick with Word and Acrobat.

posted at 03:48 pm on November 29, 2005 by James Petersen

16 RE: LaTex comment

While I think the original focus of the article is to show that HTML and CSS can use the CSS3 Paged Media Module to prepare an HTML document for printed material, I think using it solely for books is mistaken.

Also, format editors like LaTex are proprietary and will, in the near future be marginalized by free (as in beer) tools that will use common semantics and transforms.

I think the two authors show us that it is possible to created printable books using HTML and XML (using Prince tool as a the transform). However, I believe the smarter application lies in the Print command within our browsers. Heavily annotated webpages, especially health care provider pharma, would best be suited for this CSS3 module as a linkable “Print this page” URL on the intended page.

I myself have created a CSS module for print jobs using the Firefox add-on, Greasemonkey. Whereas the NY Times prints incredibly small font pages, the Greasemonkey CSS module allows me to format the articles into a much more useable printed document format.

posted at 03:51 pm on November 29, 2005 by Thom Wiley

17 Joe Clark did something like this

If I remember correctly, Joe Clark, in the writing of his book, Building Accessible Web Sites, did something like this: he wrote using HTML and produced his book from the HTML content although I don’t think he (or his publisher) took the output directly from HTML. Furthermore, he had a dual purpose in mind, to post the book to his web site so for his purposes, writing the book using HTML was perfectly fine.

This is certainly an interesting idea and learning about and using the paged media CSS properties alone is well worth this article but, like some others, I am not convinced that HTML is the right source for all books as others have also stated.

posted at 04:45 pm on November 29, 2005 by Julian Rickards

18 Joe Clark did something like this

posted at 05:12 pm on November 29, 2005 by Julian Rickards

19 Ooops sorry

After I clicked submit, I got called away from my desk. When I returned, I didn’t see my comment (Opera 9TP) so I clicked again (several minutes had passed, short memory).

posted at 05:14 pm on November 29, 2005 by Julian Rickards