Helping you Print from the Web - The HP LaserJet blog by Vince Ferraro -
Helping you Print from the Web
There have been a number of recent announcements around Imaging and Printing 2.0. These include presentations and interviews by hp’s Vyomesh Joshi (VJ) on Web Printing. While industry-insiders and the media spend a lot of time reviewing and analyzing these high-level perspectives and strategies, there are related valuable tools being developed to help the average home and business user print from the Web—printing only what you want, how and when you want it.

For instance, our HP Smart Web Printing lets you select, collect, store, combine and print the content you want from multiple websites.” Using this free download, you can select graphics from multiple sites; edit the text and graphics (resizing and deleting); scale the web page output to fit your paper—all while saving resources by combining parts of a number of web pages (just those things you want to print) into one or more printable pages. If you use Internet Explorer and want to be able to print from the web, HP Smart Web printing is a really simple and (let me say it again)—free solution.

In order to have inviting, printable layouts on your own site, you'll want to use the HP Tabblo Print Toolkit to "tabblo" your site. This delivers the Tabblo editor and template engine, all supported by the Tabblo web service. The benefits are immediately apparent when you apply HP Blog printing, using Tabblo technology to your site. You can see this functionality in action at Techcrunch.com. If you hit the "Print Posts" button, you'll see a list of blog postings by date (you'll want to uncheck those you don't want printed). From there, you can preview how the formatting will look when printed, and then simply hit the print button.You'll find that this "Print Posts" functionality is simple to embed and makes formatted printing of your site just a click away, so that readers can take your information with them.

You may ask why hp is getting so involved in web printing, especially from the blogosphere? This is all part of our plan to make printing easier as people move to “new” media (like blogs) and social networking sites (Second Life, Facebook, etc.). For the web, we’re looking to make printing as simple as possible, so that you don’t have to think twice about organizing content and printing from the web for your own use. Even the "Web 2.0" isn't perfect yet (that's why there's already talk of Web 3.0). I still find web sites that cut off the content on the right hand margins. And, as content shifts from static (e.g. text) to more dynamic web content like video, animation, and other interactive content, I think there will be new opportunities and challenges for web printing, looking into the future.

If you’re interested in adding print functionality from your blog or simply want to print from the web in easier and more satisfying ways, we’ve been working on solutions that you should consider downloading. In the meantime, you may want to click into Jim Lyons Observations, as he touches on Tabblo early and often and is beta testing the blog printing functionality. Let me know what kind of web print challenges you face . . .


Posted 07-26-2007 4:18 PM by Anonymous
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