Shawn
Thank you for the most detailed reply. We obviously have slightly different
opinions over whether those headers are "preferences" or just "defaults" - no
matter, we can't override them anyway.
Regarding the use of active-x to make a temporary registry modification or
otherwise do the output. Very interesting suggestion - I'll have a careful
look at it. Similarly, as I'm talking about intranets here, I could look at
getting the browser to execute client-side code to take the information in a
raw form and print it (actually, this is probably a job for a Java application,
I must have a look there). You've set me off on a whole new thinking path -
many thanks.
Regarding HTML formatting for paper. I called these pages printer-friendly,
but they're more than that. They are separate pages which are formatted only
for printing and are never looked at in themselves (they are opened in a
separate window and onload immediately queue up a print and a window close).
They appear to work fine with IE5.5, IE6 and FF1 which is the total extent of
the browsers in use on these intranets.
Word document reader? I've installed it exactly once - for a friend of my
wife's who wanted to use it to read DOC attachments to e-mails from her local
church. Worked like a charm. But these were fairly straightforward documents
(although they contain tables and lists which rendered well). So it can be
useful for someone who doesn't have Word, but you'd want to check-read a few of
their documents first.
> *If* IE ever provides us a means to change it via CSS I'll be in heaven ...
Note to be confused with "*When* IE provides us a means to change it via CSS
I'll be in heaven already". :-)
I've just asked pretty much the same question on the CSS-style group. If I get
any useful replies, I'll summarise back to this group.
Re the link to Adobe Designer - thanks for this, I'll certainly have a look at
it. The idea of a template being fed with data is interesting, because that
would fit my scenario precisely (template plus reformatted database data).
Again, many thanks for the reply.
Regards, Dave S
----- Original Message -----
From: Shawn K. Hall
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 10:04 AM
Subject: RE: [ASP] Print headers
Hi Dave,
> I don't think the question was about stopping the headers/
> footers permanently. I think it was about suppressing it
> for certain pages only. I think the options example was
> there more as an example of the effect wanted.
I agree, but the simple fact is that those are set browser-wide and
do *not* provide a means (outside of wrapping your content in some
form of ActiveX object) to strip those headers from a print job.
Since they are options that the user has selected (even by their
ignorance of not changing them), it's against my better judgement
that we, as developers, should strip them off. Changing what amounts
to a 'user preference' isn't the right way to handle it. Further,
HTML isn't a perfect layout mechanism anyway, so stripping off the
header and footer are probably the least of your problems - the page
might be significantly skewed in other ways just by being output as
HTML to paper. PDF is designed for consistency in print - so it's
really the best solution. Even Word doesn't have consistency, and as
'free' as that Word Doc Reader is, I don't know a single person that
has it installed.
*If* IE ever provides us a means to change it via CSS I'll be in
heaven, and I'll be using it myself. Until then, I'll just either
tolerate it or output to PDF (and I **hate** outputting to PDF).
If you have an intranet and would like to be able to control
presentation you could have an ActiveX that instantiates a class
object that stores the previous data from the registry and changes
it on initialize and restores it to their previous values on
terminate. This could be done in like a 50-line VB project. The
registry settings are going to be in the general area of:
[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\PageSetup]
Of course, this assumes that it's an Intranet and you're allowing
ActiveX to run trusted across the network. I hate assumptions.
> (I don't think overriding the user's default headings temporarily
> - even to the extent of blanking them out - should be a worry to
> users. It's not much different to downloading and printing a
> Word or PDF file - you get the author's headers and footers,
> not your own. The default settings are there really to provide
> a convenient heading for non-structured printouts, so that users
> can easily remind themselves of where and when the print came
> from.)
Word and PDF both require ActiveX objects for presentation. They can
easily be disabled so the user can control with significant
authority what gets printed on their system. I'm not making excuses
for MS, just noting that the models aren't really that similar. Just
because something is displayed via both IE and PDF doesn't mean it's
really doing the same thing.
> Shawn, you mention outputting the document in PDF for printing.
> This is an interesting option and one I'm not familiar with.
> I use Cute PDF Writer to output Word, Excel, etc documents to
> PDF for storage on web sites for download, but I've never
> investigated getting ASP to cut a report into a PDF file. I
> will get onto Google and have a look over the weekend, but if
> there is some product or pointer you could kick-start me with,
> I'd be very grateful.
What I've used in the past (and it's been months) was Adobe
"designer" - it was still in Beta when I was using it and I haven't
touched it since. Looks like they're calling it "LiveCycle Designer"
now. Basically you get a specially structured PDF document that you
can assign regions for objects, then you use an XML source or result
to stream the data in and out. ;)
http://store.adobe.com/products/server/adobedesigner/
It's pretty neat, and provides for digital signatures and stuff
should you ever need to do all that.
Regards,
Shawn K. Hall
http://ReliableAnswers.com/
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