MapBuzz Now Prints!
Posted by Charlie Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:41:00 GMT
While at Smallworld, a lesson drilled into my head time and time again was the importance of printing. By far the most common use case - someone logs into an online mapping system, zooms to address, turns on the features they want to see, and creates a printout. Its nice to dream that the web will change this, perhaps once we all have Blackberries and iPhones in our pockets, but today is not that day.
Unfortunately, browsers have a reputation of being lousy at printing, partly due to their poor typography support, differences between print preview and the actual printed pages and of course random differences between browsers.
On the bright side, browser support printing-specific CSS stylesheets, which is an amazingly powerful feature. With a lot of patience, experimentation and perservence, its actually possible to make a good looking printout from a browser. To see what I mean, take a look:
http://www.mapbuzz.com/map/print/1686
Not bad, is it? In fact, we are quite proud of our accomplishment 