"Print" directly to a Reader from Firefox

[llasram]

I've got a hack set-up I think some other people here might be interested in. Using Firefox's built-in PostScript printer support -- which allows individual printers to have their own margin etc settings and a custom command run on the output -- I can "print" from Firefox and have the result droped onto my Reader as an appropriately-sized PDF. The process is currently Unix-y only, but someone sufficiently determined could probably produce one which works under Windows too.

I describe what I've done in more detail and provide scripts & settings in a post on my blog:

http://platypope.org/blog/2007/2/9/printing-to-e-ink

Hope people find it useful!

[Alexander Turcic]

I am going to try it. llasram, you mentioned a ruby script to convert Gutenberg to LaTeX on your website. Would you mind sharing it with us? I am still considering writing a script to convert BBCode to LaTeX for our weekly newsletter, and it would be nice to see some similar conversion scripts first.

[kovidgoyal]

As a browser independent method to convert html to PDF with support for CSS html2ps + ps2pdf looks useful.

http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

[Alexander Turcic]

kovidgoyal, I have spent a couple of hours with html2ps. It's nice but there seems to be a major flaw in connection with the Sony Reader: Internal links don't seem to work. I posted more about it here. If you come up with a solution, I'd be a happy camper.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

As a browser independent method to convert html to PDF with support for CSS html2ps + ps2pdf looks useful.

http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

Yes and no. I've been using html2ps for some other tasks (e.g., generation of PDFs from the HTML in Atom feeds). For regularized HTML->PDF generation, html2ps's model of providing a custom stylesheet works great. What I was going for here is integration -- being able to go from viewing the page on the browser to having a "printout" on the Reader. I've found this to be especially useful for highly transient printouts, such as Google Maps directions.

It would be possible to make a Firefox extension which ultimately ran the current Web page through html2ps, but it (a) would need some extra work to operate properly on pages requiring credentialed access, (b) would lose / require re-writing current print feature support (e.g., print only selection), and (c) would be even less brower-independent.

Making a CUPS (etc) driver which produced an appropriately sized & metadataed PDF and dumped it on the Reader would probably would garner the most source independence. But it would lose Firefox support -- a long standing mis-feature of Gecko's PostScript rendering engine is that it can only render to a pre-compiled list of fixed page sizes. My hack gets around this by setting large margins in Firefox's configuration and chopping the PS output down to the appropriate size.

Anyway, I'm not saying my solution is perfect -- just the best one I've thought of so far for what I want to do. :-)

P.S. Thanks muchly for libprs500!