Stylesheet change to get documentation to print compactly

[Karl Ottenstein]

Just in case any of you aren't into CSS and have wanted to print some of the dev documents, such as the Library Tools doc, or the Basic Library docs, which are in HTML only:

The stylesheet for these documents defines the H2 heading style so that each heading begins on a new page...which gives you a lot of blank paper.

To save the environment and perhaps your reading sanity, you may want to open the stylesheet, which is in (example version/path):
LibDevTools_9_1810_Win/Tool/StyleLibrary/Style.css
and
BasicLibrary_9_1810_Win/StyleLibrary/Style.css

and find the code near the top that reads:

H2 {
	font-size: 130%;
	margin-top: 1em;
	margin-bottom: .6em; 
	color : #003248;
	page-break-before: always;
}

and delete the page-break-before line.

These pages may be too wide to print in landscape mode still... truncates characters for some files - for example the library devkit Readme file. In this latter case, find the perl commands in the Examples sections and, in an editor, split them into two lines ... being set with <pre> and a fixed width font, they determine the minimal page (table) width.

Hope that's useful to someone else.

Karl

[Akos Somorjai]

Karl wrote:
Just in case any of you aren't into CSS and have wanted to print some of the dev documents, such as the Library Tools doc, or the Basic Library docs, which are in HTML only:

The stylesheet for these documents defines the H2 heading style so that each heading begins on a new page...which gives you a lot of blank paper.

To save the environment and perhaps your reading sanity, you may want to open the stylesheet, which is in (example version/path):
LibDevTools_9_1810_Win/Tool/StyleLibrary/Style.css
and
BasicLibrary_9_1810_Win/StyleLibrary/Style.css

and find the code near the top that reads:

H2 {
	font-size: 130%;
	margin-top: 1em;
	margin-bottom: .6em; 
	color : #003248;
	page-break-before: always;
}

and delete the page-break-before line.

These pages may be too wide to print in landscape mode still... truncates characters for some files - for example the library devkit Readme file. In this latter case, find the perl commands in the Examples sections and, in an editor, split them into two lines ... being set with <pre> and a fixed width font, they determine the minimal page (table) width.

Hope that's useful to someone else.

Karl

Thanks for that, Karl. I forwarded it to the person writing the GDL tools documentation.

Akos

[Ed_Brown]

Karl,
Thanks for your observations and hats’ off to one who can come up with practical and constructive criticism. The fellow in charge of the Basic Library documentation has listened and revised the documentation to be more printable. Even so not everywhere did the intent match the results. To achieve the best printout it is the Basic Library administrator’s suggestion to use Mozilla Firefox web browser.

As you know the title page breaks were placed to improve the clarity of the document. Admittedly a few were unnecessary and those have been removed. To achieve the really condensed version your workaround still applies. Most places where the page side margins were problematic a more printer friendly solution was added. Where logic dictates, the line still remains together. For instance, code samples are still long. In these cases Firefox is significantly better at outputting more readable print than IE.
Thanks,
Ed Brown

[TomWaltz]

In these cases Firefox is significantly better at outputting more readable print than IE

This is a surprise? Is there anything IE is still good at compared to something else? (aside from propogation of undesirable executables).