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Idea #1: Make it easy for people to print activities

bug This idea was marked as being in development the 17 August 09.
Written by David C the 12 Jun 09 at 15:39. Category: Publishing Plings Data. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: In development
Rationale
People may want to print all sorts of activity data, from one off activities to make a flier, to a list of everything that's on at a certain place/venue, to the whole of an organisations summer activities.

The data's there, so this is a task of selecting, formatting and sending to an appropriate print service/printer!

The API can probably narrow the selections, but then a user may want to custom select from that subset.


2
votes
inprogress
Selected solution (#1): The Plings Print Selecta!
Written by David C the 12 Jun 09 at 15:39.
UPDATE DavidC dhodgson is working on the 'Plings Selecta' - which partly addresses this solution and others below. There is still work to be done tho. See: http://selecta.elasticeye.org.uk

Original Post
Could be a stand alone app, or a 'plugin'

Provide a list of plings to select from (may be using check boxes)

Perhaps have options to group, order

Provide theme options

Produce a print preview

Possibly look at integration with print service API's such as moo.com

Could be better I suspect!
1
votes
inprogress
Selected solution (#2): Working with the Tabbloid.com API
Written by stevieflow the 16 Jun 09 at 12:04.
One solution to implement would be creating some examples and templates via the Tabbloid API. This could take some data from a Plings feed and format it for use and printing.

The trick would be to then look at how this can be accessed by all
0
votes
inprogress
Selected solution (#4): Apache Cocoon
Written by David C the 4 Aug 09 at 15:36.
It's been suggested to me that:
http://cocoon.apache.org/

might be the solution to the data to paper part of this.

As I understand it Apache Cocoon uses Apache FOP as a module to print to PDF. Coccon itself is a web interface that can manipulate data sent to it (in various formats), and output it various formats.

Anyone had any experience with it?

0
votes
inprogress
Selected solution (#5): Printing from iCal Feeds
Written by timd the 10 Aug 09 at 14:56.
Given we're looking to print date-based information in most cases - we may find it useful to look for code geared up to formatting iCal feeds and then using that...


Duplicates


Comments
David C (Administrator) wrote on the 16 Jun 09 at 15:11
Tabboid is pretty cool - see: http://www.tabbloid.com and http://www.tabbloid.com/developer.

Using this to create the pdf output could be a solution, as I suspect one of the hard bits about print is knowing how much data fits on a sheet of A4.

To me the challenge then is, how do you get a useful subset of the data into an RSS feed that you would want to print. (This is where solution 1 comes in)

One of the nice things about Tabbloid, is that you can set it to email you a PDF each week - so a Tabbloid of activities at my centre this week, would be pretty good (You just wouldn't want your venue address printed against each activity!)

dhodgson wrote on the 16 Jul 09 at 10:36
Thought I would add the link to the specification for the selecta. For comment - http://docs.google.com/View?id=dd5685rz_3kvxd54hs

timd wrote on the 6 Aug 09 at 13:33
I think a tabbloid-like functionality would be great. Although tabbloid itself may not be the tool to use.

Particularly being able to send workers a PDF of activities - whether for their centre, or the local area (for detached workers etc.) by e-mail once a week would be really helpful...


stevieflow (Moderator) wrote on the 16 Aug 09 at 13:13
Re: ical printing - we have all seen many times the Outlook calendar that is printed and pinned to the wall. I'd suggest that this is an area to look at in terms of people being able to easily print a calendar. This is different from the functionality to make a selection and then generate a pdf - so perhaps this idea needs to fork into two?

1 - Print CSS on web
2 - Formatting for print / PDF output

dhodgson wrote on the 17 Aug 09 at 12:09
One of the next things I am going to look at with the selecta is the PDF output options. It is coming together quite nicely with XML/RSS/Atom outputs, do you think it would be worth trying to do an ical output as well?

If anyone hasn't seen it yet please take a look at http://selecta.elasticeye.org.uk - If there are any comments please drop me an email to dhodgson87@googlemail.com

dhodgson wrote on the 18 Sep 09 at 12:58
Just a note to say that on the Selecta I have now added the ability to sort your plings when you are making your selections. Thanks to David for the code off the wiki.

dhodgson wrote on the 19 Sep 09 at 11:42
Have just made additions to the selecta to give better sorting to the final feed, can be sorted by Venue Name, Date, Cost and Ward. As well as this I have added vCal feed support.


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