I was amused to see Oleg's (probably good) advice ... > The simplest and sure way is to utilize the best > commonly available multimedia renderer out there: > the web browser; with its printing function and ...
since I've recently been wondering if this isn't a potential "killer app": good printing from web pages. Usually, what you get is crap: it doesn't look at all good and there are large sections of (nearly) blank pages. In fact, it would probably be difficult to come up with an algorithm that's as good as normal web page printing if your objective were to end every printout with a nearly blank page containing only a single line at the top. I know that when I want to grab a portion of a web page, e.g. for part of an NYCJUG agenda, I usually have two unsatisfactory alternatives: edit a screen-capture in a paint program to preserve the original appearance or paste the text into a Word document and labor to re-create something like the original formatting. Conversion to and from Wiki pages is of particular interest as it's a lot of work to re-create my NYCJUG agenda, often ten or more pages, into a Wiki page. I've tried creating some of the agenda in Wiki format but then I have the other problem of getting a nice printout to distribute at the meeting. If you've looked at some of my NYCJUG wiki postings, you'll notice that I often end them with a scanned version of my notes from the meeting as this is the easiest thing to do. It doesn't look very good and it's not searchable but it only takes a few minutes - much faster than any other method I've been able to find. I'll be interested to look into Oleg's suggestions or hear from others who have. It's particularly ironic because HTML is descended from SGML which was intended to cleanly separate content from presentation but now it's a very dirty hodgepodge. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
