Opened 18 years ago

Closed 17 years ago

#1834 closed defect (wontfix)

RFE: printable manuals

Reported by: oracle@… Owned by: hobu
Priority: high Milestone:
Component: Documentation - mapserver.org Version: unspecified
Severity: normal Keywords:
Cc:

Description (last modified by hobu)

Throughout the site, code snippets are formatted with [pre
class="literal-block"] in an already narrow centre column layout. In some places
the results look good, but all too often this formatting causes big chunks of
code to disappear to the right of a scrollbar, making it impossible to print the
page. 

Since it's a common and very useful practice to print out manuals, I'd like to
suggest some alternative formatting for the "all in one page" documents, which
does away with the scrollbars and, preferably, with the top, left and right
"frames" as well.

Change History (9)

comment:1 by hobu, 18 years ago

yeah, that's plone.  I wasn't explicitly controlling that at all.  For printing,
however, is it not sufficient to use the PDF link to get nice printable output?

comment:2 by oracle@…, 18 years ago

Well yes, it would be, but the pdf link is not always present. I'm looking at
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/wms_time_support/ . Having a pdf link
everywhere would solve the problem nicely.

comment:3 by hobu, 18 years ago

http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/wms_time_support/html2pdf

comment:4 by oracle@…, 18 years ago

Thanks. However, I'd never have guessed that appending /html2pdf to a URL
creates a pdf. I don't know if it's a plone feature or a gis.umn.edu special
trick, but either way it's pretty esoteric. Adding a pdf link to the base
template could be helpful to uninsightful users like me.

comment:5 by hobu, 18 years ago

pretty much every page should have a little adobe acrobat icon in the upper
right corner of the center column.  Please let me know of any pages that don't

comment:6 by oracle@…, 18 years ago

You're right, I didn't see it even when I was looking for it :(

Unfortunately I just found out that pdfs don't solve the original issue,
printability. For example,
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/WCSServerFormatHowTo/html2pdf has code
with long lines in the NetCFD section. If you pdf it, you'll find that the long
lines aren't wrapped, but truncated. On page of the pdf you'll see part of the
actual code run off the edge. 

It's not a huge problem; rather a recurring minor annoyance that should be fixed
if there's an easy fix. A workaround could be to make the textarea in which
these texts are typed/pasted hard wrap, thereby forcing the authors to use \
   to split long lines. 

comment:7 by hobu, 18 years ago

I don't have a good/easy fix for long lines when it comes to the pdf.  Is the
PDF generation that we have now sufficient enough to close this bug?

comment:8 by oracle@…, 18 years ago

Well, no, unless you opt for WONTFIX. The bug is not specifically about pdf
generation; it's about printability in general. Because of the way "pre" works,
you can't print the html pages and you can't print the pdfs either. You could
remove "pre" or force the input textarea to hardwrap or change the behaviour of
"class=literal-block" and any one of these things would fix the problem in the
html. If it's fixed in the html, it goes away from the pdfs too, or at least it
doesn't matter any more. 

comment:9 by hobu, 17 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
Resolution: wontfix
Status: newclosed

Closing this one as it appears the only way to fix it is to go back through all of the html in the website. Maybe we'll revisit it at a future date.

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