Re: Question for Printer Gurus

On 9/3/2014 10:32 PM, John Yeung wrote:

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Jon Paris wrote:
Also, I disagree strongly with this:

I can't believe that printer support is so poor compared with displays - particularly since green screen are dying - but printer could go on forever.

I mean, I agree with the part about printer support being poor
compared with display support. I disagree that green screens are
dying any faster than printer output. Where I work, print is pretty
much dead.

There is an important lesson here. Midrange shops come in many
varieties. Sadly, many of us work in places where... where 'time
tested' processes remain firmly entrenched.

Finally, regardless of how easy or hard it is to learn other UI
technologies and paradigms, in large existing systems, it's easier to
replace printer files one by one in organic fashion than it is to
replace a display file here and a display file there.

I have tried HTML, PDF, Excel and an Ajax dashboard that was literally
up to the minute. Here's some of what I heard, in no particular order:
'Oh, that's nice but I have to print it anyway to put in my binder.'
'Well that's a security risk because anybody could email that to anybody.'
'It seems OK, but it's not the same as an actual report.'
'I like it when the operator drops off my report. It's too much trouble
to remember that web page thing.'
'It's so hard to read stuff like that on the screen.'

Remember, the complaints aren't coming from the developers, who WANT to
do modern UIs, they're coming from the end-users, the consumers of our
labours.
--buck