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It's undoubtedly another "designer competency" thing, but I've yet to see a
website
with a "printer friendly" button that produced a printout fit for anything
but a single
page. HTML is great for browsing through a manual online, especially if
there are
a lot of illustrations, but for printing I want a format that has "printy
things," like page
numbers, chapter headers, TOCs and indices, and for saving a document to my
drive for offline viewing, I want a document in a single file that I can
easily download,
move from place to place or send to someone else in email, not a directory
full of
individual page and image files. I'm speaking here as a *user,* not as a
developer.
HTML and PDF (not to mention all those other document types) are different
formats,
each with their own strengths and weaknesses, each designed to fulfill a
specific
need, and of all the "bad" things you can do with any of them, the worst is
attempting
to force any one of them to fulfill all needs. One of the things we as
professionals are
supposed to bring to our projects is the ability to select the right tool
for the job, isn't it?
Gene Kim-Eng
At 08:22 AM 7/15/2003 -0700, Sean Hower wrote:
If Nielson's quotes are anything to go by, then perhaps pdf isn't as
great as technocrats/technophiles (like myself) think they are and we
should stick with html and a "printer friendly" button. :-)
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