Printing
This is just a bit of blog administrivia, but one or two of you may find it useful. Justin (over that Chicken Yoghurt) emailed me earlier. He pointed out that since so many of my posts are fairly lengthy, it would be an idea to have a print version of each one.
Apparently there are WordPress plug-ins that will generate a separate version of each page for printing. Rather than go that route, however, I decided instead to finally get round to adding a ‘print’ stylesheet to the site. It’s a more elegant solution, in my view, than having two pages – one for print and one for screen.
The result is that you should now be able to print out each individual article and have it nicely formatted for page as well as screen. I decided to omit the comments from the print-out. Is this the right thing to do, I wonder? Would people prefer to have a print-out of the article plus the comments (given that could run to twice the number of pages)? If anyone feels strongly enough to make the case for including comments in the print-out then I’ll happily put them back in.
Hey Jim, that really is a neat solution and works a treat. Ta very much.
April 21st, 2006 | 2:59pm
by Justin
Generally, using CSS is the best solution Justin. But I really like the way your plug-in extracts all the links and appends them as URL footnotes to the bottom of the article. That’s not something that can be done using stylesheets alone.
When I get a few hours to spare, I’ll probably have a look at how the plug-in works. I can use the same technique to output the URL footnotes, but hide them from the screen using CSS.
April 21st, 2006 | 8:19pm
by Jim
Believe it or not, you can get the links to print at the end with Internet Explorer. Note the “Print table of links” option in the print dialog box. Something better browsers never took up.
April 22nd, 2006 | 2:49pm
by Joel