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Thread: Print Margins

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Number of posts in this thread: 12 (In chronological order)

From: Dagmar Noll
Date: Wed, Jan 26 2005 2:08PM
Subject: Print Margins
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Hi all.

I work for a public transit organization, and we want to offer our bus
schedules on the web in pdf format for printing (in addition to the HTML
versions). I was simply converting my Pagemaker schedules to PDF when it
occurred to me that they really push the margins, and some printers may cut
off info.

Does anyone have suggestions regarding how wide margins should be to be most
accessible to the widest range of printers possible?

Thanks!

Dagmar

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Wed, Jan 26 2005 2:24PM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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intern.wincog wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions regarding how wide margins should be to be most
> accessible to the widest range of printers possible?

I wouldn't class this as an accessibility issue, but here's my take:
when printing, the OS/application should give users a choice of what to
do when the print area is too small to contain the content (e.g.
"fit/stretch to page"). I'd say the onus here is on the user...

--
Patrick H. Lauke
_____________________________________________________
re

From: Paul Bohman
Date: Wed, Jan 26 2005 7:28PM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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> intern.wincog wrote:
>
> Does anyone have suggestions regarding how wide margins should be to
> be most
> accessible to the widest range of printers possible?

Many modern browsers--with Internet Explorer for Windows being a notable
exception--allow users to set not only the margin size but the percent
size on the page. Firefox (Mozilla) and Opera browsers handle this quite
well. You can print a page at 75% size, 35% size, or whatever size is
necessary or desired. So with these browsers, page width is, in some
ways, a non-issue. Internet Explorer is much less flexible.

On my computer, the width of the printed page in Internet Explorer seems
to be roughly 765 pixels, when converted into screen units. I don't
guarantee that my results on a Windows XP system will match someone
else's on a Mac or Linux, or with other variables (such as printer type)
at play, but it's a starting point for discussion at least. To be on the
safe side, you might consider 700 pixels to be a reasonable maximum
value, but it would be even better to test this out (and report test
results to this list!).

Oh, and one more thing... the printed font size *is* affected by the
screen font size in Internet Explorer. If you set the font to "largest"
or "smallest" (or anything in between), your setting will affect the
printed font size proportionally.

This means that in many ways there is no such thing as an equivalent of
on-screen width to printed width.

If accurate printout is the main goal of your project, you may consider
providing a PDF option as a supplement to the HTML. Perhaps I needn't
mention it, but I'll mention it anyway: be sure the information is
accessible. In most cases this means making the HTML version as
accessible as possible, and, as a (perhaps optional) second priority,
making the PDF directly accessible.

--
Paul Bohman
Director of Products and Services
WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
www.webaim.org
Utah State University
www.usu.edu

From: michael.brockington
Date: Thu, Jan 27 2005 4:15AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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For PDF you also need to be aware paper size - the US standard is Letter,
whereas in Europe the standard is A4 (can anyone advice on Asia / Australasia
etc?)

This is more likely to result in a PDF document being clipped than margin
width, imo.
As mentioned by others, many tools provide options to adjust size when
printing, but I would contend that most users will not know how to configure
these correctly, not least because I personally, find them generally to be
awkward and unreliable.

Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: intern.wincog [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ]
> Sent: 26 January 2005 21:12
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: [WebAIM] Print Margins
>
>
>
> Hi all.
>
> I work for a public transit organization, and we want to
> offer our bus schedules on the web in pdf format for printing
> (in addition to the HTML versions). I was simply converting
> my Pagemaker schedules to PDF when it occurred to me that
> they really push the margins, and some printers may cut off info.
>
> Does anyone have suggestions regarding how wide margins
> should be to be most accessible to the widest range of
> printers possible?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dagmar
>
> ----
> To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/
>
>


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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Thu, Jan 27 2005 7:24AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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paulb wrote:

> Many modern browsers--with Internet Explorer for Windows being a notable
> exception--allow users to set not only the margin size but the percent
> size on the page.
[snip]
> If accurate printout is the main goal of your project, you may consider
> providing a PDF option as a supplement to the HTML.

If I understood it correctly, the original question was referring to the
PDF version already. In this case, if users open the PDF (either in the
browser plugin, or the standalone Adobe Reader), the print dialog
becomes that of Reader, which includes - even in IE - options for page
scaling.

--
Patrick H. Lauke
_____________________________________________________
re

From: drs18
Date: Thu, Jan 27 2005 7:45AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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On Jan 26, 2005, at 4:12 PM, intern.wincog wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions regarding how wide margins should be to
> be most
> accessible to the widest range of printers possible?

Since someone did point out that this is an "Accessibility" list,
wouldn't the appropriate solution be to provide an accessible html page
with both screen and print styles? Why bother with PDF at all?

If, within that style, everything is relative and fluid, cropping
shouldn't be an issue.
Dagmar, you may find http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/
helpful.



David R. Stong
Multimedia Specialist, Graphic Designer

Education Technology Services, a small unit within
Information Technology Services, at
The Pennsylvania State University
212 Rider Building II
State College, PA 16801-4819

From: Webb, KerryA
Date: Thu, Jan 27 2005 3:42PM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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Michael wrote:
>
> For PDF you also need to be aware paper size - the US
> standard is Letter, whereas in Europe the standard is A4
> (can anyone advice on Asia / Australasia etc?)
>

Not sure about Asia, but the standard in Australasia is A4, which occasionally causes problems with imported documents.

Kerry
--
Kerry Webb
ACT Information Management

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From: KNOCK Alistair
Date: Fri, Jan 28 2005 2:51AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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Surely the solution then is to ensure that all formatted documents are
set in an area no larger than a standard postcard. This then alleviates
the problem of our disobedient comrades who defect from the grand plan
of all buying exactly the same printer model, and for whom adjusting a
single setting in the main print dialog is a cardinal sin.

If at first you don't succeed, try and try again. Let's not assume our
users are idiots. They may be, but that's not our problem. Set out
formatted documents in the way that will benefit your largest target
audience. I'm assuming that Dagmar isn't proposing to provide online
bus schedules for the entire globe, as beneficial as that may be. But
like Patrick says, Dagmar isn't printing the document, the user is.
Maybe your users won't even print them! Maybe they'll save the trees.
I would just push the content right to the boundaries and assume that if
the user can't work out how to adjust print settings, then they'll be
used to failure anyway and it'll all be OK.

We're in the business of opening doors, not spoon feeding.

Alistair

From: michael.brockington
Date: Fri, Jan 28 2005 4:59AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: aknock [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ]
> Sent: 28 January 2005 09:52
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Print Margins
>
> Surely the solution then is to ensure that all formatted
> documents are set in an area no larger than a standard
> postcard.

No, the solution is to shoot any americans that fail to use the ISO standard
page sizes, ie A4 etc. :-> Whats the point of XHTML strict if its printed
on 'Letter'?


> If at first you don't succeed, try and try again. Let's not
> assume our users are idiots. They may be, but that's not our
> problem.

Accessibility is not just about blind people - the print settings in Acrobat
are far from intuitive imo.



> Like Patrick says, Dagmar isn't printing the document, the user
> is. Maybe your users won't even print them!

If they have chosen the PDF option rather than the HTML it is reasonable to
assume that they want to print them, sin't it?



> We're in the business of opening doors, not spoon feeding.

The original question requested advice - it is up to him how many doors he
wants to open, I don't think anyone was demanding that we all worry about
margins.

Mike


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From: Dagmar Noll
Date: Fri, Jan 28 2005 8:00AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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Thanks to all who replied to my print margin inquiry.

Our service is very local U.S.-- a small, rural transit agency. Paper size
is still an issue though. The best we could do in getting all the info onto
the schedule was legal size, which isn't always somethig folks have around
the house. However, there is a second way to print the schedules. They are
also available as data tables in html documents.


> Since someone did point out that this is an "Accessibility" list,
> wouldn't the appropriate solution be to provide an accessible html page
> with both screen and print styles? Why bother with PDF at all?
>
> If, within that style, everything is relative and fluid, cropping
> shouldn't be an issue.
> Dagmar, you may find http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/
> helpful.

David Strong's comment really made me stop and think. Right now we have
schedules represented in many flexible data tables on one html page; I broke
up the large paper schedule into small html tables. The idea of putting up
PDFs was so that it could be easily printed in a concise form that was
identical to the paper schedule for folks who preferred that. Then I was
creating large print paper schedules and posting them on the internet. Then
the margin problem (exacerbated by legal format) came to mind.

So...now I'm thinking that perhaps the html tables themselves, since they
are very much scalable, should be the focus of my print efforts, since they
are already quite accessible?

In any case, if I stick with PDFs, I'm going to leave the scalability to the
user's program. Thanks for that.

Dagmar

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Fri, Jan 28 2005 11:04AM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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michael.brockington wrote:
> If they have chosen the PDF option rather than the HTML it is reasonable to
> assume that they want to print them, sin't it?

Not to be contrary or anything, but sometimes users also download the
PDF because it's a nice, discrete "package" (particularly when there's
images, maps, etc added) that they can email, take around on a flash
drive, whatever (rather than having to "save this page" and having
potential issues with needing the downloaded images, stylesheets, etc).
Not saying it's always the case, or that it applies in this instance,
but thought it would be worth throwing into the mix here...

--
Patrick H. Lauke
_____________________________________________________
re

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Fri, Jan 28 2005 1:06PM
Subject: Re: Print Margins
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> Our service is very local U.S.-- a small, rural transit agency. Paper
> size is still an issue though. The best we could do in getting all
> the info onto the schedule was legal size, which isn't always
> somethig folks have around the house. However, there is a second way
> to print the schedules. They are also available as data tables in
> html documents.

I'm not sure if there is much point in offering legal sized PDF
documents...especially if you are offering the HTML version anyways.

Have you considered redesigning the PDFs so they're 'letter' sized happy?
(Of course, at that time, you could take into accound margin issues as well
along with A4 paper...which, AFAIK, the entire planet uses instead of us
Americans. ;o)

FYI, just a thought. I rarely ride the bus, but when I've had to, I've never
found PDF bus schedules useful. What I'd really like to do is be able to
type in point a, then point b and have the web site tell me what bus to take
and what times I can take it at. Granted, this would be a tad more complex
than uploading some PDF files, and public transist is rarely the most funded
entity these days. ;o)

> So...now I'm thinking that perhaps the html tables themselves, since
> they are very much scalable, should be the focus of my print efforts,
> since they are already quite accessible?

I would agree with that. Of course, if you already have paper documents
anyways, it's not a big deal to offer them as PDFs online as an option. But
I'd definitely put the most effort trying to get the HTML versions nice and
usable.

-Darrel