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Compton Communications"An Internet Communications Agency"
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Articles
Just Print itPosted Monday, June 30, 2003 Format your e-newsletter for printability and online viewing E-newsletters have a special problem, I never expected. Some web format e-newsletters editors are forgetting that they need to be easily printable. I don’t know how many times I have tried to print out news stories or news releases online and found that the page cut off in mid sentence and part of it was missing. With Portable Document Format (PDF) e-newsletters, printability is never an issue since the format is readily printable. The problem with most PDF e-newsletters is that multi-column format is agony to read on the screen since you have to scroll down, over and then up to view the whole article or jump to the next page. I think most people just print a PDF newsletter out in order to make it easier to read. Newsletters that are made with Microsoft Publisher have the same problem. They make look fine as a printed page, but the Web version is difficult if multi-column formats are used. So how can you improve the e-newsletter so that it is both readable online and easy to print for offline viewing. Depending on the type of e-newsletter you are producing, there are techniques to achieve printability and good online viewing for your e-newsletter. Text e-newsletters need to be formatted with lines of no more than 65 characters to a line. Using spacing and special characters for accent and to break up blocks of copy. HTML e-newsletters require table size that does not exceed 525 pixels. Table max size can be established by using a banner head graphic of this size. To get the best print for online news stories and articles, add a print utility to the page so that formatting and graphics are removed to make the article easy to email or print. Print utilities are available at a number of Web utility script sites. Compton Communication uses a print utility on its news release and article pages. The “printer friendly” utility removes page navigation, background and graphics so that the article is simple to output to a printer. |