Printer-friendly format

[mislav]

Hi

I don't know if I posted my question to the right forum, but I hope I am. I would like to make available to my visitors they can print the story in printer-friendly form, e-mail it to a friend or proceed to read the whole story. How can I do this? Are there any scripts that can do this, or I'll have to do it myself in PHP or HTML? Can anyone help me, please, any help is more than welcome.
Thanks!

[kparker]

I don't know anything specific to point you to, because the subject itself is conceptual rather than technical. That is, you are the sole determinant of what is "printer-friendly" for your situation. In general, you basically want to have two different templates (whether literal or figurative) for your content, one with all the ads, bells, whistles, etc, and one without any of that.

[mislav]

Hi Kirk. Thanks for your answer. In fact, I want the following: When I upload my news using Newspro.cgi, that news item is gonan show up on my site. In Newspro, while writing the item, I usually put a link on that story to some other website. Now, below the item I submit, I want to have three menus: Print this story, E-mail this story and Read the whole story. What I want to achieve is, when user click on "Print this story", he wolud be redirected to the other page, which would contain that very same news item, but in printer-friendly format, meaning without pictures and fancy format of the news item itself. That is what I want to achieve with that "printer-friendly" format. 🙂 I.e., here you have a normal news item: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2795678,00.html , and here we have it in the way I want to have it for my site too: http://www.zdnet.com/filters/printerfriendly/0,6061,2795678-10,00.html . You acn look for an e-mail example there too, that is what I want. But...how?

[abelajohnb]

Well, there are a few different methods.

Typically, the sites are db driven, which make it easier than if the sites are static.

If the sites are db driven, than you just pass through the same db data to a different "template".

If the sites are static driven, than you need to create the static file with the same code twice. (or create the same code in two seperate files)

If you used the same file, you would use the SWITCH & CASE method.

If you don't use the above, you would just need to get your "news publication" script to write the data into two seperate files.

That is the overview of how to do it 🙂

Later.

[mislav]

Ok, tnx for advice, everything is much clearer now 🙂