Printer-Friendly Mode Returns to TidBITS

On Apr 7, 2008, at 3:51 AM, brown_foxpacaccess.com wrote:

> Good show..!


I want to second the accolade; I've been waiting for this for a long
time, as I often print web items for reading when I am away from a
computer (doing laundry, waiting in line, etc.).

I'd also like to know if it is possible to change the interface so
that the width of the center area, containing the text is variable,
allowing the width of filled area to adjust to the width of the
browser window being used. With the advent of wider screens, one often
makes windows fairly wide. For example, when I open the Tidbits page
in my current Safari window on my 23" monitor, the right 25% of the
window is blank. It would be nice to use that space.

Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

... you're taken to a nearly color-free ... page .... Images are also removed.

Why is it necessary for a printer-friendly format to be devoid of color and pictures? Just because I want to be able to print an article without the header, navigation bar, Google ads, related article links, etc., doesn't mean that I don't want color and images. These are part of the article. Printer-friendly mode should just remove the things that aren't part of the article.

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why the site takes you to a
new window with the specially formatted page rather than using CSS to
achieve the same functionality? After all, the site already has a
print-only stylesheet:

<LINK rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/tb-new-
print.css">

Hey, it even works with Netscape 4.08 under MacOS 8.1!

Thanks!

At 2:21 PM -0700 4/7/08, Alan Forkosh wrote:
>I'd also like to know if it is possible to change the interface so
>that the width of the center area, containing the text is variable,
>allowing the width of filled area to adjust to the width of the
>browser window being used. With the advent of wider screens, one often
>makes windows fairly wide. For example, when I open the Tidbits page
>in my current Safari window on my 23" monitor, the right 25% of the
>window is blank. It would be nice to use that space.

 From what I'm seeing, it does work like that. One caution - very long
lines are harder to read than lines of roughly 60-70 characters, so
don't assume that wider is always better.


At 10:26 AM -0700 4/9/08, jamesgnoble wrote:
>Why is it necessary for a printer-friendly format to be devoid of
>color and pictures? Just because I want to be able to print an
>article without the header, navigation bar, Google ads, related
>article links, etc., doesn't mean that I don't want color and
>images. These are part of the article. Printer-friendly mode should
>just remove the things that aren't part of the article.

Hmm, good questioning of our assumptions. I could easily see graphics
embedded in the article being included as relevant, but the only
color that appears would be links, and since you can't click them
from paper, the [#] approach to referencing them seems more practical.


At 4:11 PM -0700 4/9/08, Conrad Hirano wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why the site takes you to a
>new window with the specially formatted page rather than using CSS to
>achieve the same functionality? After all, the site already has a
>print-only stylesheet:
>
><LINK rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/tb-new-
>print.css">

Glenn would have to answer this for real, but my impression was that
the CSS print-only stylesheet simply didn't work very well. I'm not
sure if it could eliminate all the things we wanted gone.


At 1:17 AM -0700 4/10/08, Carl S Zimmerman wrote:
>Hey, it even works with Netscape 4.08 under MacOS 8.1!

I can say with some assurance that that's merely a testament to
Glenn's excellent coding, and not to hours of testing. ;-)

cheers... -Adam

At 12.47 -0700 2008-04-10, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>At 4:11 PM -0700 4/9/08, Conrad Hirano wrote:
>>Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why the site takes you to a
>>new window with the specially formatted page rather than using CSS to
>>achieve the same functionality? After all, the site already has a
>>print-only stylesheet:
>>
>><LINK rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/tb-new-
>>print.css">
>
>Glenn would have to answer this for real, but my impression was that
>the CSS print-only stylesheet simply didn't work very well. I'm not
>sure if it could eliminate all the things we wanted gone.

The question of using a css for print or a separate printer friendly page is matter of discussion. Having a separate page styled for printing has usability advantages since what you see is what you print so it better meets user expectations.

In any case, when using a link to a printer friendly version of the page it's important to make sure the print version is not indexed by search engines, both to avoid irrelevant hits and to prevent getting a lower page rank due to similar content on different pages.
On the link to the print version add rel="nofollow" to stop search engines from following the link when indexing.
On the print version page add <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
I think the TidBits print page lacks this.


--
     Johan Sölve

On Apr 10, 2008, at 12:47 PM, Adam C. Engst wrote:

> At 2:21 PM -0700 4/7/08, Alan Forkosh wrote:
>> I'd also like to know if it is possible to change the interface so
>> that the width of the center area, containing the text is variable,
>> allowing the width of filled area to adjust to the width of the
>> browser window being used. With the advent of wider screens, one
>> often
>> makes windows fairly wide. For example, when I open the Tidbits page
>> in my current Safari window on my 23" monitor, the right 25% of the
>> window is blank. It would be nice to use that space.
>
> From what I'm seeing, it does work like that. One caution - very long
> lines are harder to read than lines of roughly 60-70 characters, so
> don't assume that wider is always better.
>
It does seem to cut off at about 65 characters using my standard 14
point type). I guess I have gotten used to reading wider lines on
other sites. I think that a serif font (as Tidbits uses for article
pages) can used in wider lines without problems. I note that the width
is not flexible versus font size. If I make the font size smaller, I
get more text; bigger, I get less.

Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

On 10-Apr-2008, at 13:47, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> At 4:11 PM -0700 4/9/08, Conrad Hirano wrote:
>> Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why the site takes you to a
>> new window with the specially formatted page rather than using CSS to
>> achieve the same functionality? After all, the site already has a
>> print-only stylesheet:
>>
>> <LINK rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/tb-new-
>> print.css">
>
> Glenn would have to answer this for real, but my impression was that
> the CSS print-only stylesheet simply didn't work very well. I'm not
> sure if it could eliminate all the things we wanted gone.

I've used css print style sheets on numerous occasions and never had
an issue.

Anything you don't want on the page you simply set to display: none;

At 2:04 PM -0700 4/10/08, Alan Forkosh wrote:
>It does seem to cut off at about 65 characters using my standard 14
>point type). I guess I have gotten used to reading wider lines on
>other sites. I think that a serif font (as Tidbits uses for article
>pages) can used in wider lines without problems. I note that the width
>is not flexible versus font size. If I make the font size smaller, I
>get more text; bigger, I get less.

I'm just not seeing this. In OmniWeb, Safari, Camino, and Firefox,
when I expand one of our print-mode windows, the text expands to the
full width of the window, even across multiple monitors.

I also wanted to note that Glenn added a toggle for images so you can
choose whether or not you want to see/print embedded screenshots.

cheers... -Adam

On Apr 14, 2008, at 1:32 AM, Adam C. Engst wrote:

> At 2:04 PM -0700 4/10/08, Alan Forkosh wrote:
>> It does seem to cut off at about 65 characters using my standard 14
>> point type). I guess I have gotten used to reading wider lines on
>> other sites.

> I'm just not seeing this. In OmniWeb, Safari, Camino, and Firefox,
> when I expand one of our print-mode windows, the text expands to the
> full width of the window, even across multiple monitors.

Adam,

I'm talking about the ordinary mode window, not the print mode window
when I measured width. The point was that with wider screens, some of
us use wider windows and would like the page to efficiently use the
space given it.


Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

On Apr 10, Adam Engst wrote:
>At 1:17 AM -0700 4/10/08, Carl S Zimmerman wrote:
> >Hey, it even works with Netscape 4.08 under MacOS 8.1!
>
>I can say with some assurance that that's merely a testament to
>Glenn's excellent coding, and not to hours of testing. ;-)


I believe that, and I'll venture to speculate that Glenn's definition
of excellence, like mine, includes criteria such as "Don't depend on
proprietary or obscure features that probably are not widely
supported."

This is nice. However, I usually print out the email I receive and read it on BART. This is "TidBITS Issue (HTML)". Inside many articles is this:

[View image]

If I click on this, in Apple Mail, the image appears in another window. These images do not appear when I print the email. Is there a way to get them to appear inline in my email? If they did, then I think they would print out.