Printing

Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758. Paper was expensive and printing difficult and time-consuming. The type would be inked, the sheet of paper laid on the press, the apprentices would press the sheet, by turning a big screw. Then the sheet was removed and hung up to dry. Then you can do another printing of the same page. Do this ten thousand times and you have ten thousand prints of a sheet. Do it ten thousand more to print a second sheet. Then print the second side of the first sheet ten thousand times and print the second side of the second sheet ten thousand times. Fold 20,000 sheets into eighths, cut and bind them into 10,000 thirty-two page pamphlets and you have your Almanacks.

Nobody would disagree with the author of this tweet, Simon Kuestenmacher — of course it’s nice to have your map available while you are reading along.

The reason it doesn’t generally happen is not, surprise, surprise, that publishers had never thought of it — it’s because it’s very expensive. Every book should of course have maps set up like this, and every book should cost another $5 or so for each tip-in pull-out in it. Four or five maps and you’ll be getting to the point where it’s cheaper to buy a second copy and use your scissors to cut the maps out. Once you’ve done that, maybe you can Scotch-tape them together as similar handy pull-outs!

At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting the same physical output everyone's familiar with.

This article explains some of the CSS basics that control how your webpages look when printed, and a couple of tips and tricks I've learned that might help you out.