1 Wow

That is really cool, you just gave your webpage a bibliography, the gap between web and print has been bridged.

posted at 02:24 am on September 20, 2005 by Jamie Fehr

2 Simply Brilliant

Thank you for your hard work, this script will certainly make it easier for users to archive sites.

posted at 02:35 am on September 20, 2005 by Sean Foushee

3 Untitled

I did something similar over a year ago (wrote to A List Apart back then to recommend it as an article – twice – but got no response). It really is a highly useful technique, and this is a great overview of it.

My solution added a couple of extra things – firstly I had an ‘exclude’ list – of classes and id’s – any links inside them got ignored (this allowed people to print my blog articles, but not have navigation links shown up). I also created a screen-view with the print style sheet so you didn’t need to use print preview (I just used some simple javascript to extract the print style sheet and rerender the page with it). I never did do a proper writeup, and now someone’s beaten me to it :-)

posted at 05:42 am on September 20, 2005 by Sam Newman

4 Cool!

The techniques on ALA never cease to amaze me with their ingenuity and this one is no exception. This article has educated me twofold – firstly, by showing me that you can actually display links in a print stylesheet (something I was never aware of) and secondly by showing that you can, with a bit of simple and logical scripting, format the links into a readable footnoted format. Excellent stuff.

posted at 06:19 am on September 20, 2005 by Andrew Beeken

5 Print style screen view

Great article. Kudos to everyone at ALA :D

In Sam Newman’s post (3) he mentions providing a screen-view of the print style – something like ‘view printable version’. I have always wondered if we should or should not be providing this functionality to users. What does everyone think?

Why would users need to view the printed style? To check that we are not going to waste all the colours on their printer? :P … Is knowledge of printed styles so fleeting in web users that they need to see for sure they are printing a stripped-down ready-for-print version?

Love to hear what people think about this. Maybe there is already an article on it over at useit.com

posted at 07:24 am on September 20, 2005 by Alex Bobin

6 Print style view

Its weird because 3 days ago I posted an article on how to show links when you print an article from the web. You can read the article here
Of course it is not that advanced as the A List’s.

Really good article.

posted at 08:33 am on September 20, 2005 by Petros Dimitriadis

7 This just Rocks!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

This lovely little snippet of JavaScript is definitley one I will use repeatedly! I thought the article was very well written.

As for Alex’s question (5) I think a print preview would be a good option just simply because of the varying paper sizes and margins in spme printers. I have in the oast had to modify my margins prior to printing to allow me to get everything in the articles without really breaking up the flow and outline.

If you offer the visitor a print preview they can see what it will look like at their default printer settings so that they can make any adjustments needed.

Again though I can see this script having a very long and useful life in the archive of useful JavaScripts I have been puttin together. Thanks again for all your hard work!

posted at 09:15 am on September 20, 2005 by Jeffrey Allen

8 Great Stuff!

I must say I really love this idea. The original method (going to print) was pretty clever, but it did render quite… ugly :) This is beautiful though! Well done!

posted at 09:36 am on September 20, 2005 by Paul Boxley

9 SIMPLE AND BRILLIANT!

Really simple technique, but such a brilliant idea! congratulations!

I agree with Sam about implementing an exclude list, and I suggest that not only menu links should be excluded but even all the internal links, I think only externals and files (PDF, DOC etc.) links should be printed…

For example in a presentation page on a commercial site often happens that a link to a page already in the menu is recalled into the text body: “And don’t forget to visit our [url=“http://www.mysite.com/customers”]customers area[/url] to find out offers & discounts”.

Why should you report this link? To reach main areas of the site you just need the main domain.

This technique is awesome if used as “Bibliography” and link/cite your sources, but pay attention not to link “everything”.

Bye

posted at 10:06 am on September 20, 2005 by Pierluigi Pesenti

10 External links only...

Well assuming you’re using relative links for everything on the site, why not just check if the href commences with ‘http’ ?

This is a cool technique, but i’m not 100% convinced. I mean if someone really wanted to check out a link, then to go to the original article and select it is only one extra page load + a mouse click.

If they wanted to check out more than one then they would probably do that anyway to save typing.

posted at 10:33 am on September 20, 2005 by Matt Turner