guide reset

Printing Web pages is not a simple job. Usually Web pages are designed to be displayed on a screen only. Therefore you have to face the following problems:
• The screen’s format differs from the format of a sheet of paper, even when you use the landscape format.
• Often Web pages show bright letters in front of a dark background.
A printout may need much toner or ink as well as the printout might
be difficult to read.
• The pictures or graphics on a Web page normally have a resolution optimised for the display on a screen. As printers work with a
higher resolution, the outcome might be of a much lower quality.
• Information referring to the same topic is often spread over several
Web pages connected by hyperlinks, so you might have to print
every single Web page individually.
The problems of printing Web pages are known to Web designers. Some of them might offer you two versions of a Web page, one optimised for being displayed on the screen and one for printing. If you want to print out a Web page, look out for a link that leads you to
the print version. Some problems, e.g. the lower resolution of online pictures, cannot be solved. Certain problems can be solved if you choose the right options offered by your Web browser.
Different browsers offer different options. The following explains the most important options offered by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Before you actually start the print job, you can choose certain options
either in the Page Setup Dialog or in the Print Dialog.
Open the Page Setup or the Print Dialog from the File menu. Both
dialogs may offer some of the printer options besides the ones
referring specially to Websites. Choose,
• which information has to appear in the header and the footer of the
page, e.g. the URL or the title of the Web page
• whether the Web page has to be scaled to fit the paper format
• whether the background has to be printed or not and whether the
letters are to be printed in black.
Web pages containing frames:
• choose if only the marked frame is to be printed, all frames should
be printed individually or the whole page as it is displayed on the
screen.
Web pages containing hyperlinks:
• choose whether the corresponding Web pages are to be printed
within the same print job.

Printing from a windows application is very easy. Just open the File menu and select “Print” command. Windows has been offering different methods to configure printer with the OS. Currently widows support Novell Netware printing, LPR printing, IPP printing and Email printing.
Which Print Method to Use?
The optimum Windows printing configuration depends upon your particular environment including user and administrator experience and preferences. Netware print Services will be utilized when an Netware Server is present. LPR printing is being used most commonly if TCP/IP is already in use. NetBEUI Peer to Peer printing is most often utilized when a centralized NetWare or Windows Print Server is not used. IPP or e-mail printing
is utilized when printing across the Internet is required.
In general, remember the following about different printing methods:
LPR:
Printing to a Windows LPR spooler over TCP/IP. I have described what is “spooling” in my last posts. Just remember that this function may be helpful if you are going to print a lot of data and also want to work on the application from which you are printing. By using “spool” all printing data is temporarily saved in another folder and transferred to the printer form there, not from the application, so application is free to accept further commands.
IPP:
Printing over the Internet or intranet using the Internet Printing Protocol. Printing over the internet is very popular these day. Ill explain it later in a new post.
E-Mail:
With this function, a print job can be e-mailed to a remote printer, such as over the Internet, using the standard print function in any Windows application.
NetBEUI:
Peer to Peer printing using the NetBEUI protocol. Printers are available in Network Neighborhood.
Windows Printer Sharing:
Printing to a shared network printer which is configured on another Windows machine.

Since the 70s, a time when printing was just committing ASCII text to paper line by line, the LPD protocol is used to control the printers output. Printing became a more and more sophisticated job by a growing variety of text formatting options and the addition of pictures,
today even of a photo-realistic quality. This is why time and again each manufacturer added his own extensions to LPD and the different specifications usually were incompatible to each other.
Now a new protocol is ahead, the Internet Printing Protocol IPP. IPP is on its way to establish a common standard for all the different printing devices and operating systems and therefore will enable comfortable printing across any network from LAN to the Internet. IPP bases on HTTP, the well-known WWW standard. In the same way HTTP transmits web pages containing text, pictures, sounds, script code etc. from a server to a client or e. g. a forms data from the client to the server, HTTP is able to transmit any kind of data needed for network printing. Clients, printers, print jobs, and even administration assignments and status queries can be identified by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). A HTML based user interface can make printers and their configuration options available by an ordinary web browser. Apart from the network abilities IPP will make several new features available:
• A client doesnt need to send a file to the printer (push method),
the client simply directs the printer to fetch the file from where it is
stored (pull method).
• A client is able to find any of the networks printers, even when a
printer is unknown to the client so far.
• A client is able to get detailed information about a certain printer.
• A printer is able to start a print job before all of the print jobs data
have arrived.
• A single print job can consist of several documents.
• Printers and print servers can be configurated from any point of
the network.
• Printing across a network, especially across the Internet, will be
save, because transmitted files can be encoded and users can be
obliged to authenticate themselves.
Today already about a hundred products from printers to applications provide IPP abilities and a first IPP application, CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), is available for UNIX based networks.