Hello,

Several times recently I've had requests to produce Perl-driven web pages that print out nicely on a single page. The issue of course is that this isn't really a Perl issue-- it depends on their browser and OS. I've thought of a few solutions to this, none of which I'm convinced are the best available:

• Produce a PDF on the server. My understanding is this involves a commercial module and is non-trivial to take a working HTML page and reproduce the same thing in PDF output.
• Produce a PDF on the client. I believe this involves purchasing Acrobat (about $220) for eachc client that wants this feature, and then there is still a wait time for Acrobat to grind away to convert the HTML to a PDF, mostly to get a "shrink to fit" printing option.
• Print from a word processor. Another solution is to save the HTML file to the desktop, open it in Microsoft Word (or another HTML-reading word processor) and then use the word processors printing features. This works, but it's slow, at least with Word 2000 on Windows 98 and a ~500 Mhz processor, it took a bit of grinding just to open and print a single page with an HTML table on it.

Does anyone know of solutions in this area that are easy to develop and easy to use? Thanks,

-mark

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