Printer Friendly pdf's, What Makes Em Printer Friendly.

ukgpublishing · Jul 19, 2005

We are trying to decide on how best to format a large document to be 'printer friendly' and would value the opinion of the EnWorld community.

Thanks

Vascant · Jul 19, 2005

Okay, I am going to be the odd one here probably but I like to print what I see on the screen. The way my mind works is memorizes a page and the format, so when I need to look up the information ever again, I know what kind of page I am looking at. I also spend 10+ hours a day coding, think I want to read here as well?

Most of all, my PDF's like some color even when I print

Staffan · Jul 19, 2005

1. Try not using pictures that have big swathes of black or other color. That just eats up ink/toner.
2. No page-background images. Just black text on white background.
3. If you're using sidebars, don't have them filled with color/black. Again, waste of ink/toner.
4. No need for pretty filler in the margins. It's nice to have decent (but not excessive) margins though, because most people who print out your stuff will put it in a binder rather than go to a printshop to get it professionally bound.

That's what I can think of off-hand.

ukgpublishing · Jul 19, 2005

Just to clarify, I'm looking at a product that will have a full colour, bells and whistles version of the pdf, an html browser based version and a printer friendly version, but as most of our products have been tilesets up to now, the printer friendly version is an alien beastie

Thanks

Cid

Sledge · Jul 19, 2005

rather than removing graphics, just make them lighter and with lots of spots of white. The key isn't no colour so much as low ink usage.

HellHound · Jul 19, 2005

What I tend to do is remove border & background elements & sidebar backgrounds, but leave sidebar borders and primary artwork.

Prest0 · Jul 20, 2005

For our printer-friendly versions, I remove the cover artwork (leaving the title page to act as the cover) interior artwork, and sidebars. (Although we've had a request to add the sidebars as plain text at the end.) Colored text is replaced with black and the heavy bars of color in our section headings are removed.

Incidentally, we don't do an HTML version and have never been asked for one.

JoeGKushner · Jul 21, 2005

For me, there's a huge difference in making a print product a PDF by pushing the old Print to PDF and making it an actual PDF.

In addition to removing borders, having no grayscale backgrounds to eat ink, and having images be in grayscale from the start, there should be some utility.

For example, a monster book, or a traps book, or something that can be printed one at a time, should have some type of file where yes, the creatures/traps/items, are put into their own page so that you don't have unwanted information like the start of a new monster/trap/etc...