High Quality Printing from the Web
Introduction
- Introduction to W3C staff
- Rest rooms and phones
- Audiovisual facilities
- Goals of this Workshop
- The agenda
- Changes to the agenda
The Broad Picture
The Web as an Online medium:
- vt100 terminals e.g. Lynx
- Windows/Macs/X11 e.g. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer
- PDAs and mobile access
- Speech-based browsers
The Web has seen exponential growth since 1992 and is set to become
as commonplace as the phone, fax machine and photocopier
Document creation - the changed emphasis for the Web versus paper:
- Loss of control over appearence
- Scrolling versus paged layout
- The impact of dynamic page resizing
- Much greater emphasis on color
- Dynamic features: animation, video and sound
- Frames, form fields and embedded controls
- Scripting
The potential of the Web to increase the amount of printing, and
the increased focus on color printing:
-
Newspapers, Journals, magazines, catalogs, brochures, product info,
business reports, memos, school home work assignments, family
photographs, personal letters, ...
Distributed printing advantages over traditional centralized printing
and hardcopy distribution:
- Reduced costs
- Faster distribution
- Wider distribution
- Easy to personalize
The Rapid Evolution of the Web and the Role of the W3C
W3C as a facilitator for collaborative development of
open specifications.
Our work on HTML, Style sheets, PICS, HTTP etc.
- Conferences
- e.g WWW'5 in Paris.
- Workshops
- Like this one.
- Mailing lists
- W3C supports several mailing lists on various topics
- Working Groups, e.g. HTML-ERB
-
- Regular phone conferences
- Mailing list
- Physical meetings
How should we move forward with Printing?
This workshop will help us to answer this question.
Missing Pieces for High Quality Printing
The following are possible topics for the discussion groups:
Increased reliability
This is of great concern, but outside the scope of this workshop.
Changes to HTTP to specify the target medium
.
This will enable you to down load higher resolution images
for printing versus online use. It will also provide a means
to obtain style sheets tailored for the paper size etc.
Whats needed and how can we make this happen!
Changes needed to Style Sheets to support Printing
- Pagination info
- Page layout masters
- Generation of label text for links
- Numbering of headings
- Multicolumn layout
- Table of Contents support
- Index generation
- Links - as references, footnotes, sidebars, etc.
- Headers and Footers
- Odd vs Even pages
- Color models
- Dealing with collections of Web pages
Font handlig
What can be done collaboratively to improve this?
- Naming lexical restrictions, local/global names
- Font matching when to fall back to next choice?; font
classifications; PANOSE
- Character sets ASCII, Latin-1, Unicode, etc., Symbol fonts,
code pages, user defined characters
- Licensing per site/user/document?
- Copyright issues
- Formats for requesting and downloading fonts a heterogenous
solution seems to be needed
- subsetting this is essential for Web use
- antialiasing and hinting for online use
Other topics
- Providing the means to prevent users from saving copies,
printing this page or printing a collection of pages.
- Color handling - ensuring that the web page when printed
still looks the same, e.g. for marketing brochures or corporate
logos
- New Web formats, e.g. for resolution independent drawing
and imaging formats
- The impact of client-side scripting on printing, e.g.
JavaScript and VisualBasic Script.
Dave Raggett