Printing the SDC SF1 Profiles from the Web

To print the multi-page profiles when accessing via a web browser requires 
capturing the contents of the file in a software application that will allow you 
to print that content and specify precise printing parameters.  Currently, no 
such capabilities are available in either of the major browser programs, 
Netscape or Internet Explorer.  This makes it a more complicated, multi-step, 
multi-program process but it is doable.  

The reports are designed to be printed in landscape orientation with a font of 
Courier New 8 (or equivalent) with margins of .2" top and bottom and .5" left 
and right.  They display 149 characters horizontally and use 64 lines vertically 
on the page.  By doing a printer setup with the above font, orientation and 
margin settings we have been able to get the reports to print with exactly 64 
lines per page, as required.  There are explicit "new page" characters (hex 
'0C') in the files at the beginning of each new page except the first.  There is 
no sign of these once we bring the file into Word (when we do a file-save as and 
browse the resulting file with a text-oriented editor, Ultraedit, we can see 
these characters in the saved file.)  So it appears that the ability to get 
output to exactly fill pages requires an exact match in print setup parameters -
- it will only start a new page when it has completely filled up the current 
one.  Which will only work if you can make it print exactly 64 lines per page.  
  

Here is how we did this, step by step, using MS-Word as the printing 
application.  

If possible, begin with Netscape as the browser and assume you are browsing one 
of the profile reports.  

Invoke MS-Word to create a new document (from Windows click Start - New Office 
Document - Blank Document).  Then:

1. Set the font to Courier New - 8. 
2. Go to Page Setup:
* Change "Paper Size" to specify Landscape orientation.
* Change top and bottom margins to .2, .2 and .5., .5 for left and right margins 
(important to do this AFTER specifying landscape).
3. Return to the Netscape session where you have selected a profile report and 
have it displayed in the browser.  Type ctrl-a to "select all" text in the 
current file, followed by ctrl-c to copy it to the clipboard.  
4. Go back to the MS-Word session.  You have a blank document with the cursor 
positioned at the top.  Type ctrl-v to paste the text of the profile report into 
your document.  It will insert the text and should leave you at the bottom of 
the document and at the top of a new, blank page.  At this point you are ready 
to do a file-print to send the report to the printer.  You should probably do a 
file-print preview to make certain that the pagination is correct.  
5. Do a File-Save as to save the current document as a MSWord document, along 
with the font and page setup specifications.  In future sessions you can open 
this existing document instead of having to go through the process above to 
define your setup. When the previous document loads you can type ctrl-a (select 
all) followed by hitting the Delete key to erase the content of the previous 
profile.  At this point you are ready to paste a new profile into the document.  
Of course, you can always leave the old text alone and do a paste at the end to 
append a new profile to the document rather than replacing it.  

You might expect or assume that the process just described using Netscape would 
work the same with  Internet Explorer (IE).  That would be too easy.  When you 
browse the profile in IE and do a select-all followed by a copy (ctrl-a, ctrl-c) 
and then try to paste the result into your Word document you will see that line 
breaks are not maintained and the document is "flowed" and thus the format is 
not preserved.  The way to get around this is to save the profile to a temporary 
file on your local disk using IE File-Save as, and then bring that file into 
Word.  This works, but not without a glitch. When doing an Insert-file in Word 
to insert the text of the new profile in the current document, the font changes 
for some reason (even when we specified Courier New - 8 as our default font.  It 
automatically used a size 10 font which, of course, messes up the delicate 
balance of formatting required here.)  This can be fixed by selecting the 
included text and respecifying the font.  At this point the text aligns itself 
and you will be able to print the document.   This process is probably too many 
steps for most users, but if you only need a couple of reports it makes it 
doable. 

Surely, there must be a simpler way to do this, especially when using the IE 
browser.  There is some subtle thing we are missing in how to insert the file 
into Word, or some option in IE that will tell it not to throw away the critical 
line breaks when it copies text to the clipboard.  We are offering rewards for 
anyone with information leading to a more elegant and simple solution to this 
problem.