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:

•  Set the font to Courier New - 8.
• Go to Page Setup:
  1. Change "Paper Size" to specify Landscape orientation.
  2. Change top and bottom margins to .2, .2 and .5., .5 for left and right margins (important to do this AFTER specifying landscape).
• 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.
•  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.
•  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 re-specifying 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.

Text Version of this document: http://mcdc2.missouri.edu/webrepts/sdcprofiles1/how_to_print.txt