Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by W Page -
Number of replies: 10

To Anyone who knows the answers to the following questions.  I have not been able to get clear answers after searching the forums and /or reading many posts.

QUESTIONS?

  1. Will all resource pages be printer-friendly?  I could not find a clear answer to this question after searching the forums.  I did see that the "Gossary" will be.printer-friendly.  One will be able to print-out by Alphabet Letter or the entire List in the Glossary.
  2. At one time I saw a thread about PDF files on the "fly".  Has there been a decision about this?  Will Moodlers have the choice of printer-frienly and/or pdf file generation on resource pages?
  3. Will "Moodlers" be able to E-mail links to resources to other members in a class or to an instructor?  If the "Dialogue" module is to be used for this type of communication, will users be notified by e-mail that they have a message at the MOODLE site?

Thanks in advance for any and all responses.

WP1

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In reply to W Page

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by Tom Murdock -
W,

I can't give you definitive answers, but I'll make a start.

1. You are correct, if you click the printer button above the glossary, you get the glossary parsed in clean page format for printing. As for the other resource pages, what degree of friendliness do you prefer? The resources do all print and because Moodle is a simple interface, not much appears at the top or bottom. I'm thinking of a "printer-friendly" page from an online newspaper or something...most of them seem to have breadcrumbs or footer/headings, too. If you experiment on a moodle installation, you can create pages and then print them (feel free to use demo.somewords.org--though the link probably won't be alive forever). My suggestion would be that if you wanted them to appear differently, maybe you could make a feature request in the bugs.moodle.org tracker. Just be clear about what you would want the pages to look like. Often, it is helpful to the developers to work from a mock-up of what others want to see.

2. Since the search is on for a Document Management System that can be integrated into Moodle, I don't expect a great deal of changes to occur in the resource module right away. I suspect that PDF and printer-friendly generation would be great features to look for. Right now, eyes are focused on OWL as a potential candidate, you might check to see if it has those features. If not, perhaps you might uncover another good candidate that does have the features. This kind of research is really helpful in moodle.org.

3. Many of us use forums as a simple way for a class to create lists of student-discovered links (because of the subscription function, the email potential already exists); but moodle.org just started a handy glossary of links which might work for you, too (though it doesn't have an email function).. And yes, the dialogue has a toggle that allows all of the private messaging between two people to be duplicated and sent as email as well.

Good luck!

best,
Tom
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In reply to Tom Murdock

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by W Page -

Hello!

Thankyou for such a quick and extensive response.

1.  Many times a resource is a web page or a page with text or maybe a powerpoint document.  Part of the problem in printing them out is they do not fit on either a "portrait" or "landscape" letter size document.  This is because the left side of the page consists of navigational/menu info.  The ability to print without the nav/menu blocks/column whould be helpful in saving paper and ink to most folks.  Also, the ability to create "PDF" files of the printout page would make the file more "transportable'.  Also there are other uses for these features as evidenced by the following posts and discussions.

Re: Electronic Portfolios: Exporting

Re: Re: Is anyone using Moodle for reporting?

Re: Re: New Module - Certification

Re: "Student Portal" Module

Re: Electronic Portfolios: Exporting

2.  I have left a post at the "OWL" forum to find out their feelings about the addition of printer-friendly pages and on the generaltion of on the "fly" "PDF" files.  As soon as I get an answer I will post it here.  "OWL" does allow for e-mail notification.

3.  I appreciated the opportunity to peak at demo.somewords.org .  I think it would be very helpful and efficient if there was a "drop down" window with a list of the course members  and instructors names.  This would make it easier for students to contact other students in the course as well as instructors.  A feature like this for the instructors would also enable them to send messages more easily to other instructors.

SOMEMORE

When I reviewed the "PDF" forum related posts I noted that one Moodler  used another program other than the one I referred to in a previous post.  It is  PDFCreator    and was referred to by Marc Dastous.  Maybe this one is easier to implement inside of another program.

My programming skills are almost "zlich".  I am learning but it is a slow process.  I am definately not even close to many of the folks woking on MOODLE.  I will just have to hope someone who knows what they are doing will feel what I have posted is significant enought to work on it.

Again, thanks for your response Tim.

WP1

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In reply to W Page

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by David Lamotte -
I'll take a crack at Question 1.

Will all resource pages be printer-friendly ?

Everything in moodle is already 'printer friendly' - you just have to use the power of your style sheets.

Having seperate 'printer friendly' pages appears to be a thing of the past - you can select what does and what doesn't print just by defining it in your CSS Style Sheets.

There are numerous tutorials on the web, but a good place to start is:

http://www.evolt.org/article/Kissing_Print_Versions_of_Pages_Goodbye/20/22225/

or

http://www.pmob.co.uk/faqcss/tutorial03/index.htm

David
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In reply to David Lamotte

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by W Page -

Hello!

Thank you for your response and the links.  This was very interesting and something I will try on a website I am working on.

My concern, however, is that from reading the articles especially the first one, the older browsers may have trouble handling this kind of coding.  MOODLE is free and open source.  It can be installed in poor and rich countries and therefore will be useful in many places which may not have access to the more recent browsers despite the fact that most are free.  This will be because of limited access to the internet and the use of older computers.

I think it would be better for MOODLE to generate a page for printing if more browsers can handle the coding for that.  Also many people save these pages so they do not take up space on their hard drives with unecessary graphics.

How does anyone else feel about it?

WP1

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In reply to W Page

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by N Hansen -

I'm a bit late into this conversation, but I'm with David on this one. Why not add a CSS style sheet for printing? Nothing could be simpler than pressing CTRL-P and getting a nice printed version. A PDF on the fly of a page is not going to look so good as a printed document (eg it will have sans serif fonts instead of serif fonts, it might be too wide) as a CSS style-sheet print formatted page would. And for a "portable" version of a course, not for printing but for screen viewing, a PDF is not very nice to read. I hate reading PDFs on a screen, it's not easy nor nice looking. Someone who wants a portable page would be better off saving the html page in my opinion.

As for people with older browsers, making a CSS style sheet for printing doesn't prevent them from printing the page, they just won't have that added functionality of it being optimized for print. And if you are concerned about people with older browsers, don't forget that older browsers don't have very good support for PDFs either. They sometimes require installing a plug-in, or opening it up in a separate program altogether. I remember wrestling a lot more with opening PDFs in old browsers than I do with my ability to simply print out a webpage. And if we should be so concerned about old browsers, then why does Moodle use CSS at all? In short, CSS doesn't prevent anyone from using material, it just adds extra functionality for the 98% of people these days who have browsers who can handle it.

I'm not that familiar yet with Moodle to create a CSS style sheet for printing, but I would love it if someone who did would try this. I add another link to an article about this to give someone a very nice example (try printing or print previewing this article) of what can be done.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/

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In reply to David Lamotte

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by Runy Calmera -

Hello,

David you are right!

I have been told that if you put all your documents in Docbook (the open source standard) you can just:

- Throw a PDF stylesheet to it and it will convert it into PDF

- Throw a powerpoint stylesheet to it and it will convert the information to Powerpoint

-Throw a Print friendly stylesheet to it and you will have the info in black and white.

So when moodle moves to XML in the future (??) you will be able to dynamically change the output format (PDF, Printerfriendly etc) by "simply" making the right stylesheet.

 So we should just wait a while...

Runy

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In reply to Runy Calmera

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by W Page -

Hello!

That may all be very true but what about older browsers on older systems?  Just forget about them? black eye

WP1

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In reply to W Page

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by Runy Calmera -

I see your concern.

However, XML will be platform independent. And there are a lot of free opensource browsers which support or will support xml.

If you really want to give people with old browsers on older systems, access to internet, and information, I suggest you let them download http://openoffice.org and one of those opensource browsers? It's all free and they will be right ahead with the latest technology.

Regards

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In reply to Runy Calmera

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by Ger Tielemans -

in Backup is the complete information of a Moodle course in XML-format:

If you combine this with a good XSLT conversionscript, you have it all:

Get inspired at http://aurigadoc.sourceforge.net/

You even can create all kind of HTML(single and multi page), DHTML, PDF, PostScript, Formatting Object(FO), RTF, Java Help and HTML Help(.chm).

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In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: Questions about printer-priendly & pdf generated pages, email and Dialogue Module.

by Runy Calmera -

Ger,

Can you point me to that moodle course in xml format? I'm interested, and would like to taek a look at it.

Runy

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