High-Quality Printing from ASP
low-cost approach

Printing of HTML documents usually creates several problems: pictures are split across pages, tables layout is distorted, author has no control of printed margins, headers and footers, HTML forms can't be easily made non-printable. All these problems aren't important for Internet designer as most web pages are created for screen previewing but they could be very dangerous for intranet programmer as all office work eventually leads to a printed hardcopy (at least in present time).

Here you will find some manuals on producing high-quality printed output form Active Server Pages. All these techniques I developed for my projects and found them working pretty well.

Microsoft also has some tips which address this problem, but they are limited to a situation when client and server computers are located close enough because printing is done from server on LAN printer and user have move to it to pick up his printed pages. This is surely not acceptable if you are sharing documents with a valued business partner from another city. Here I'll tell you how to make printing on the client computer which can reside thousands miles away and have dial-up, VPN or normal Internet connection to server.

I'll cover two basic scenario. The key to all of them is switch from HTML to another format, which is more suitable for printing, and use helper application designed specifically for printing nicely formatted documents.

1. Rich Text Format (RTF) and Word. If you are using Word in your organization, this is probably the simplest way to print important documents. Additional advantage is that ASP generated RTF files can be edited and/or included in another Word documents. For example, I used this technique in a situation when monthly report, prepared by project manager, contained textual part written by humans every month, and several tables with monthly data summaries. Implementation of RTF-based documents allowed easily generate complete report with one mouse click and then just to type in or paste the textual part. And RTF doesn't necessary means Word, most text processors can impport RTF files and Microsoft is giving away "Word Viewer" which also can read and print RFT documents.
   

   • RTF from ASP with Word (beginner level manual)
   

2. Portable Document Format (PDF) and Acrobat Reader. Another solution is to generate PDF documents and read/print them with Acrobat Reader, freely available from Adobe. There are several advantages in such approach: PDF is really cross-platform format as Acrobat Reader exists for most operating systems, PDF allows embedding of fonts which insures total identity of what you and your client see on screen and print on paper, PDF documents can be easily grouped together to form a searchable libraries (archives), PDF forms can be used instead of HTML forms to create non-printable user interface with updateability similar to one provided by Microsoft's RDS technology. One particularly interesting example of PDF usage is generating documents with barcodes--something very sensitive to print quality. Another example--complex reports with custom headers/footers, sections/subsections, table of contents, index, etc. (real book!)
   
   The following manuals are not ready yet but you can ask me to pay more time to some of them:

   • PDF from ASP with LaTeX (intermediate level manual)
   • PDF Forms with Acrobat (intermediate level manual)
   • PDF from ASP with COM object (master level manual)

(c) 1999  Radamir