Printing of Areas and Routes and MiniGuides

Areas and Routes now have a "Printer Friendly View".

Click the "Printer Friendly" link (there is a little printer icon) when viewing an Area or Route to create a page that will look good on a printer.

If the area you are printing contains routes, then you will be presented an option to check routes to print as well. This only works for areas that directly contain routes (i.e. that don't contain other areas).

Image printing will be along soon as well.

This is a preliminary version, and there will be some improvements within the next few days.

Andy

Nice work, Andy!

Maybe add a "Print All Routes" checkbox for areas?

A minor bug: "Show Thumbnails" does not display thumbnails that are linked from other pages.

Ok - some improvements...

• Uncheck/Check all (thanks Ron!)
• Linked images work
• You can display images fullsize if you desire
• You can limit the images to beta images only

That is so cool! Great addition to the site.

Thanks for the quick fixes, Andy. I still think a separate "Print Photo" feature would be useful. The problem is page breaks; photos can be split across pages when everything is printed out when they are included with route descriptions. This was the big problem with printing full-size beta photos on climbingboulder.com.

I really like the route print feature! Thanks for that addition. Now, I wonder if the same thing can be done with the route finder feature.

Meaning... Perhaps it can be made so you can chose an option on the route finder to include route descriptions (just the route descriptions, not the entire wall descriptions), and print them out as well instead of just the names of the routs (which is all that can be done now). Then print that out.

Possible?

Thanks for all the hard work!

Tony

I've added single page image prints. Anthony - I'll check into that RF question.

Andy,

Thanks for the "Printer Friendly View" for photos! One improvement: provide an option to rescale the photo so all the content fills a single 8.5"x11" page. Allow scaling to be done for either portrait or landscape mode. Small beta photos are hard to read!

Here are two test photos:

Avalon Upper Wall Routes. Photo taken from Upper Animal World. (portrait) and The First Tier and Tarot Wall areas of Avalon. (landscape)

Thanks,

Ron

I made some printing improvements.

Printing single images should work better. I'm now using the highest resolution photo we have available for the image and I stretch it to best width.

Ron - with the new changes, your two sample images printed out great on my color laserjet. Thanks for pointing those out.

I can't do the landscape/portrait thing unfortunately since I am just outputting HTML. I would need to create a PDF file to do that which is 1) complicated 2) requires technically savvy users.

When printing a bunch of routes for an area, you can select Medium or Best quality for the images since the higher quality images take much much longer to download.

It's not perfect, but it should get the job done until I want to explore producing PDF files.

Printing a 'miniguide' for a crag/area is kind of cool!

Andy

Great job, Andy! The mini-guide is really sweet!

Some improvements:

• linked photos don't show up when you print a mini-guide or print a route; see Modern Times at the Gunks.
• When I printed Modern Times, I got a page break after the MountainProject header before the route printed out. This is probably an artifact of my web browser; it didn't occur when I used another browser.
• There still appears to be an issue with photos being split across page boundaries when large photos are printed following the route description. Could you insert page breaks as needed to ensure that no photo gets split across two pages?

The day of traditional guidebooks is coming near!

The mini guide is really neat. If this is the preliminary I can't wait for the full version. Thanks for implementing it. John

This site is just getting better and better!

Thanks a lot for that, Andy!

Tony

I made another small, but useful improvement. The default state is to print all beta photos, or at least one action photo if no beta photos are present. This results in at least one (generally) useful photo for each route that has a photo.

For instance, here is a Supercrack Buttress Miniguide . Quite useful if you're heading there IMO!

Regarding those bugs Ron mentioned:

• The page break is an annoying Firefox side effect (at least I only get it in Firefox). I haven't been able to fix it
• Do you have an example where a photo is split? Both IE and Firefox don't split photos for me.

I'm getting more motivated to buff out the miniguide, and to do that I'll need to output PDF. HTML is just too clunky. That will give lots more control over pagination, etc. Maybe even a table of contents.

I also want to allow printing of a toplevel area (i.e. Indian Creek), but to do that we'll need to output PDF as the files could get big and a browser is a pretty clumsy tool for big files.

Work in progress...
Andy

Andy,

The PDF option would be great, especially if it had a Table of Contents.

What I would like to see is an option to print 2 sheets per page. I don't know what you call it here, but down south it would be A5 format. Then it would be a true miniguide and you could easily put in a a pocket etc. Although, I suppose I could do that when I print it with the properties of the printer.

Cheers,
John

I've tried several browsers and get different results with each. My test was Modern Times at the Gunks, printing both photos in large size.

Linux Firefox 1.5.0.1: page break after the MP.com header; first photo is not split across page boundaries. Second photo is not printed at all.

Linux KDE Konqueror 3.5.1: no page break after the MP.com header; but first photo is split across page boundaries.

Linux Opera 8.5.2: everythings prints properly.

So there are significant browser-related differences in printed output. I don't think it's worth spending too much time trying to get everything to work with every browser (but it would be nice to fix the Firefox problems).

Ultimately, I think the PDF solution is the way to go.

Ron and Andy,

I just tried doing the same Modern Times test on my xp box.

With Firefox 1.5.1.0, only the first photo printed.(Michael climbing). Should the second photo be showing?

No problem with page break.

With IE 6 same result, only the first photo printed and again no issue with page breaks.

I have two test Linux boxes at work, Suse10 with Konqueror and Fedora 4 with Firefox that I can test tomorrow if you like.

Cheers,
John

John,

Did you un-check the "(Recommended) Limit photos to 'beta photos' or at most a single action photo" box?

Did you select "Largest Available" for the Photo Size?

Does the second photo show up in the HTML output prior to printing?

Ron Olsen wrote:John, Did you un-check the "(Recommended) Limit photos to 'beta photos' or at most a single action photo" box? Did you select "Largest Available" for the Photo Size? Does the second photo show up in the HTML output prior to printing?

Okay, ran the test again this morning, this time paying a bit more attention.

It looks fine on the monitor but when you go to print: I have a page break just before the Mountain Project title.

I end up with four pages:

Page 1: title
Page 2: Description
Page 3: Photo
Page 4: Photo

Mozilla 1.0.7 on a suse 10 box.

I'll test it now on xp and Fedora.

IE6 on a xp sp2 box.

Prints perfectly on three pages:
Page 1: title and description
Page 2: Photo 1
Page 3: Photo 2

Linux FC4 with KDE 3.4.2

Mozilla 1.0.7

Looks find on screen:

When I print:

Page 1: mp title
Page 2: description
Page 3: Photo
Page 4: Photo

Hope this helps.

One enhancement I'd like to see: the ability to print a miniguide starting at an area which contains subareas, not routes. For example, The Bastille or Peanuts Walls. Now, all you have at these areas is "Printer Friendly View", which does not print subareas or the routes they contain.