Lining up for printing on preprinted paper form

F

FC

Hi all:
I am trying to find out if there is a way to line things up before
printing using html. I have a dot matrix printer and a pre-printed 4
copy form. I am going to get the data from a database and it will be
displayed in a web page. I want the user to be able to load the form on
the printer and hit print and my data will be lined up with the
pre-printed fields on the paper form. Any ideas? I am also open to
alternative ways to achieving the same thing.

Thank you all,

FC
 
J

Jose

I am trying to find out if there is a way to line things up before
printing using html. [...]
I want the user to be able to load the form on
the printer and hit print and my data will be lined up with the
pre-printed fields on the paper form.

Nope. HTML gives a browser "suggestions" but the browser is always in
control, and each browser may do things differently, especially in
layout. For total layout control (such as for printing), use PDF. It's
a more unwieldy format and requires the user to have a PDF viewer (most
do) but, especially if you keep to the lowest level of PDF (so users
don't have to continually upgrade just to see the page) it should do
what you want.

Jose
 
D

Dan

FC said:
I am trying to find out if there is a way to line things up before
printing using html. I have a dot matrix printer and a pre-printed 4
copy form. I am going to get the data from a database and it will be
displayed in a web page. I want the user to be able to load the form on
the printer and hit print and my data will be lined up with the
pre-printed fields on the paper form. Any ideas? I am also open to
alternative ways to achieving the same thing.

I do something similar with our intranet based invoicing system using
CSS, but I know what printers we use, what browsers, installed fonts
etc - even then there are times when in f*cks up a bit.

I would suggest that a CGI script that exports a PDF might be the best
way for you to go - how easy it would be depends on your webhost - if
you have a nice one, or self-host, then there are heaps of Perl modules
on cpan.org that would help you out.

Let me know if I can be of any assistance.

Dan (back in alt.html... old skool style)
 
A

Andy Dingley

FC said:
I am trying to find out if there is a way to line things up before
printing using html.

This is easy with CSS and you certainly don't need to mess with PDF

Just use all those absolute positioning tricks and absolute dimension
units that are seen as so bad to use for on-screen work. Font sizes in
points too. You can hide all this behind @media print { } so it
doesn't even look bad on-screen either.

The only real problem left are your margins and footers. You need to
set these to some known value before printing, because they affect
positioning on the paper but they're not settable from CSS. Either do
it by hand (given it's a dedicated machine and printer) or use MeadCo's
ScriptX ActiveX control to set them on the HTML page (with some
browser portability issues).
 

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