Printing
Submitted by urbanmike on Tue, 09/25/2007 - 23:09.
One of the big things I'd like to see, and I wanted it in aC0.6 and 0.7, is the ability to print out messages, whole project discussions, task lists etc.
This is imperative for record keeping and wider adoption of the software. So many people still print out emails, or need to take a hard copy to meetings etc.
I'd love to hear other views on this, and what needs to be done to move in this direction.
As an aside, has anyone tried to "slice and dice" the data in openoffice base or something? Their new reporting plugin by Sun should be able to extract all messages relating to a particular tag or something like that.
Well anyone with a printer can print a page off of a website by going to file > print, so there's always that option available if you absolutely need the document. The problem happens when people print styled pages and end up with wonky formatting and too much confusing navigation (links dont' do much on a page).
The main thing we'd want to do to facilitate printing is to set up a high-quality CSS stylesheet for the print media and include it by default. Something that would hide all the navigation, emphasize the title and date, and make the content clear without wasting ink (especially color). Viewing source on my install gives me the following:
<link href="/public/assets/themes/goCollab/stylesheets/project/messages.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" title="" media="" />
<link href="/public/assets/themes/goCollab/stylesheets/project/attach_files.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" title="" media="" />
<link href="/public/assets/themes/goCollab/stylesheets/project/comments.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" title="" media="" />
<link href="/public/assets/javascript/widgets/UserBoxMenu/widget.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" title="" media="" />
Which, because of it's lack of media mention, gives away a distinct lack of concern for printing.
Since PP only uses one real set of templates with CSS stylesheets creating the themes, we really only have to make one official 'print' CSS stylesheet and include it on all pages. This should be in the next release for sure.
Urbanmike, if you feel like it feel free to work on a stylesheet that will do these things and show it to us. I'm adding a ticket in the tracker for it now.
A good idea, I'm a CSS beginner, but I'd like to stay involved in thinking about this.
Some of the things I'm thinking are:
- you would want to see comments, but not the comment form
- you wouldn't want to see the side bar
- you would want to simplify the page header
- you would want to strip out color and standardize the text to say 12pt
- you would want links to still be noticed in grayscale
- remove footer, except for copyright info
Is there some way to create a page or series of pages that represents the project timeline, I'm particularly thinking about getting messages all on one page in Chronological order, or just by tag?
Hi,
It could be a good idea to have the content of a page you want to print processed by a seperate php-script. This way, you can easily organize the whole content and reorder it when preferred
I'm thinking of something like the Drupal views module http://drupal.org/project/Views
Where you can create a view for a project report or detailed summary, but also provides something printable?
I'd almost like to see something as a blog output rather than a table - maybe a print all nodes link within a project.
I also realise that this may be a good add-on rather than core :-)
I was thinking that instead of directly printing from the browser, ProjectPier might benefit from having the ability to provide PDF versions of the project components. Perhaps an ability to get a PDF copy of only the messages or list of milestones, or of messages and task lists, or of the whole project. Then, that formatted PDF file could be the one to be printed.
A print style sheet should be enough IMHO. Maybe different style sheets for the different components.
If you can print it to a "normal" printer you can add a PDF printer driver (like FreePDF for Win or cups-pdf for Linux) to your machine and produce a PDF. If you're using a Mac then you already have that possibility.
By *not* implementing a PDF script we can make the PP application simpler and less buggy.
Agreed. This would be a nice feature but should be left for the deep future when we have time to speculate about what would be nice rather than what needs to get done asap.
I agree, PDFs are "nifty" but creating them adds a level of complexity to the program which is probably not necessary. I would however strongly second the "print" css.
While I am not a CSS wiz, if no one else is working on this, I can give it a crack.
~ Christopher
I have a (mostly) working version of a print css file in the issue tracker.
Unfortunately, I am getting occasional behavior where on text field does not wrap to a new line, but instead appears behind another.
In the mean time, please take a look at the file I posted and make comments.
~ Christopher