Re: Publishing / typesetting print documentation in HTML + CSS (+JS)

[Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca>]

Hi Jimmy,

After I took an XML course, I posted my resume on my website as XML,
formatted through different style sheets (CSS) for screen and print.
However, I could not account for the different browser setups.
Settings like portrait/landscape and page margins are out of the
developer's control.

You would want to involve an HTML 2 PDF step for fine page controls.
That would become your print documentation.

Nowadays, you probably wouldn't be managing the docset manually. Most
HTML/CSS source is generated from a CMS app of some kind. The content
is created and stored independently of its output. Different templates
are used to generate the HTML for screen an HTML2PDF for print. The
look of both is directed by the CSS.

Wiki software like MindTouch, Confluence, and TWiki have excellent
plugins for PDF output, as well as a WYSIWYG text editor. MediaWiki is
extremely easy to set up, but the WYSIWYG editor plugin does not work
with IE7.

Part of me wonders, that if you're already going this far, you might
find it an intriguing exercise to jump right into maintaining a DITA
doc set and customizing your output to what you need: Help, Web,
PDF... It's a larger headache than just HTML/CSS, but much of the work
is done by the open tool kit.

Of course, the benefits of DITA are found only if you write a lot of
reusable information.

Good luck!

-Tony



On 2011-08-14, at 5:05 AM, Jimmy Breck-McKye <jb527 -at- hotmail -dot- co -dot- uk> wrote:

>
> Does anyone here have any experience publishing paper documentation using HTML and CSS?
> Because my job involves testing and diagnosing problems in web applications, I've an awful lot of opportunities to learn about these technologies. It makes sense to learn one, versatile tool well rather than two poorly. It also makes sense to use technologies that are well-documented and easily understood by my peers. CSS helps me tick all these boxes.Practically speaking, I'm told that print CSS handling is quite mature on certain browsers, and from what I've seen, it looks as though CSS can do an awful lot. It also looks pretty straightforward to implement an XML - XSLT - HTML + CSS toolchain (as much as XSLT's syntax irritates me). Working in plain XML would free me to implement parts of my toolchain in other technologies, too (I've had especially good experiences transforming XML with Python scripts).But that's just the theory. Does anyone have any practical experience on this point? Any advice or common pitfalls?Thanks in advance,Jimmy/p>(Also, apologies if the carriage
> returns are broken. The Techwr-l mail handler seems to have a particular issue with my emails)
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