The Mozilla Print Gidget

Wide World Web Wonder Widget -- Mozilla Printing

This is an experimental service. You type in the URL, and the awesome power of Mozilla will transform the HTML into wonderfully formatted PostScript which will be delivered to you.

This translation is based on the same printing code as is used by the X versions of Netscape. Since this is only an experiment, I get to try out ideas for printing here with fewer restrictions than I would have if I wanted to print them in the client. It is fair to say that you will see all these in Mozilla eventually.

Please send me mail with any problems or comments you have. Here is the birth announcement for the Wide Wonder Web Widget World. I am also keeping a list of known problems with the Print Gidget.

URL:

Click the button to submit this form and receive the postscript output.

Headers / Footers

If the boxes are checked, a header and/or footer will be printed on each page. You can specify the text and layout of these strings. Inside the header and footer strings, the following string substitutions will occur:

    %%    Generates the % character
    %P    Replaced by the current page number
    %N    Replaces by the total number of pages in the document
    %T    Replaced by the title
    %U    Replaced by the URL
    %D    Replaced by the date
    %M    Following data is centered
    %R    Following data is right aligned
    %S    Causes a separator bar to separate the main text and the header/footer

Header:
Footer:

Paper

Select the size of paper you wish to format for. If you are not selecting one of the pre-defined paper sizes, make sure you get the orientation right.

Set the units for custom paper sizes and for the margins.

Units:

Size

US Letter
US Legal
A4 Letter
B4 Letter
Custom (set sizes below): Width: Height:

Margins

Top:
Left: Right:
Bottom:

Orientation: Layout:

Fonts

If your printer does not have the selected font loaded, your document will not print. I have included the the set of basic fonts installed on most laser printers.

Font sizes

Small
Medium
Large
Custom (set sizes below): There are seven sizes used by Netscape. They should increase in value, and the third size is the one used for normal text. The default values roughly match the "Medium" setting in Netscape.

Images

Be careful with these buttons. The higher the quality setting, the larger the generated PostScript file will be. If you don't have a color printer, don't ask for a color image. If you have a medium to low quality color printer, the 12 bit version will probably be all you need.

Image Scaling: When an image is too big to print on a page, Netscape scales it down until it fits.
Image DPI: Images are scaled on the printer as if they displayed on the screen at this resolution. The default setting should match most high resolution displays. Other common values might be 72, and 115.

Various Options

PRE Scaling: When Netscape notices that a line of text in a PRE section is going to overflow the right edge of the page, it scales the entire PRE section horizontally until that section fits. Sometimes there is only one long line and it is annoying that the whole section is scaled instead of letting the one long line run off the edge.
Underline Links
Print pages in reverse order

Horizontal Lines

You have gross control over how the <HR> elements display in the document. Some people prefer thinner lines than even the SIZE= tag allows the to specify. Your selection here will scale the thickness of all HR's in the document.

Rule Height:

Time To Print

Ignore this next paragraph if it makes no sense to you.

Now comes the fun part! You get to receive the translated version of your URL. The normal type for this data is "application/postscript", and your browser probably already has a converter for that type. However, the action of that converter, while perfectly reasonable for random .ps files found on the web, may be different that the action you want done when using the wonder widget. In that case, you may replace the default type returned with one of your own, so you can do something special (like automatically send to the printer) with data that comes from the wonder widget.

MIME Type:

Click the button to submit this form and receive the postscript output.

Credits

This form and the PostScript translation code were written by Michael Toy.