RE: Best document formatting language

I think you will find that IE 7 (currently in beta) provides a number of
important enhancements around printing that you may want to consider
based on this discussion.  This includes:

* automatic shrinking of content so it fits the width of the page, for
preview as well as printing directly to the printer; 
* automatic shrinking of content when the 2nd of two pages is
practically empty, so it will fit on a single page;
* ability for users to scale content to various other sizes if the
automatic size is not satisfactory; 
* new buttons on the Print Preview UI to select either Portrait or
Landscape orientation; * new button that toggles headers and footers; 
* the ability to print frames separately and shrink it to fit.

>From a JavaScript perspective, IE 7 adds a new Refactored XMLHTTPRequest
as native JavaScript object to better enables AJAX-style applications
and that XMLHTTPRequest is no longer subject to ActiveX being allowed to
execute.  

 
David deLisi,
Microsoft Corporation 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+daviddel=microsoft.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+daviddel=microsoft.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 5:47 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Best document formatting language

> I recently put an app in production and was forced
> to provide instructions to users that they had to
> manually switch to landscape mode before 
> printing. How stupid is that?

It's not only a problem with Internet Explorer.  Other
browsers have the same problem.

Developers need the ability to  set page properties
(portrait/landscape, margins, headers, footers) in
advance through JavaScript, before calling the
window.print() method.  Otherwise default settings, or
settings performed by users while in page preview mode
may cause the HTML page to print outside the currently
defined boundaries.

Based on articles at the MSDN library, Internet
Explorer page settings can be controlled through an
ActiveX interface, but evidently not via JavaScript.

If browsers were able to support page setup via
script, it seems to me that HTML would be great for
stylized portrait and landscape printing.

Nathan Andelin


                
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