Print friendly Field Guide pages

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bobcat
Posts: 2764
Joined: August 1st, 2011, 7:51 am
Location: SW Portland

Print friendly Field Guide pages

Post by bobcat » December 17th, 2016, 1:58 pm

I thought I'd try to get some input/suggestions for adding a print friendly feature to the Field Guide.

The 'app' that's been suggested to me is Print Friendly.

With this particular application, there are three possible ways to go as far as I can figure out:

1. Publicize the app on the Field Guide index page. Users can add it to their favorites bar and click on it when they want to print any open web page. Basically, you can look at the print view and then click out anything you don't want to print, including whole sections of text, extraneous headers, images, etc. You can check a box to exclude all images, but if you want a map to be part of it, then you'll have to click out the other images individually.

Anyway, with this app, you can reduce a trailhead page from sometimes three pages to less than one page with just the directions.

2. Put a link to the app in the generic header. It's free if you can tolerate a few ads.

3. Pay $40/year to have the app link without ads (I'll have to ask the TKO Board if they want to pay for this).

So that's Print Friendly, but maybe some of you have other suggestions . . .

In the past, I've simply copied and pasted the text I need into a Word document. That works, too.

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Martell
Posts: 2045
Joined: May 28th, 2008, 10:03 pm
Location: SW Portland

Re: Print friendly Field Guide pages

Post by Martell » December 17th, 2016, 8:51 pm

That's a neat app, and that would be an easy way to do it.

Another thing we could do is just add some more css styling for printing.

Mediawiki has a default print style sheet here: http://www.oregonhikers.org/w/skins/com ... nPrint.css

We could set the css to hide most of the header, Main/Find a Hike/etc links, the Contents area, and most of the footer. I think that would get it most of the way there towards looking like Print Friendly's output.

It still wouldn't have that neat "click to delete" feature, so we might want to do both, and still have Print Friendly as an option for people who wanted it.
-Dan
Site Tech Helper

Webfoot
Posts: 1759
Joined: November 25th, 2015, 11:06 am
Location: Troutdale

Re: Print friendly Field Guide pages

Post by Webfoot » December 19th, 2016, 6:10 am

Would it be practical to have a for-printing version of each page (unrelated to Print Friendly) on the OregonHikers.org server itself, just as there is a Print view on this forum page?

I use Nuke Anything Enhanced, select what I want to print, and use Remove everything else.

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Martell
Posts: 2045
Joined: May 28th, 2008, 10:03 pm
Location: SW Portland

Re: Print friendly Field Guide pages

Post by Martell » December 19th, 2016, 1:49 pm

Webfoot wrote:Would it be practical to have a for-printing version of each page (unrelated to Print Friendly) on the OregonHikers.org server itself, just as there is a Print view on this forum page?

I use Nuke Anything Enhanced, select what I want to print, and use Remove everything else.
In each Field Guide page there is the following code:

Code: Select all

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/w/skins/common/commonPrint.css"/>
What this does is load a special style sheet for print only pages, so it's sort of doing what you are saying, but without an extra page. If you print a page of the field guide you'll see how it looks different than the screen version. It probably just needs to be simplified further.
-Dan
Site Tech Helper

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