Review: "Master Printer Friendly Page" Script
By Ralph Moore (c)2003

Have you ever wondered if there was an easy way for you
to offer your web site visitors a "printer friendly"
version of a web page?

Well, thanks to another fine script from the folks at the
Willmaster web site, there is!

Below is the link to another no-cost script that can easily
be used to make any web page "printer friendly". When I get
a spare moment, I will be adding a link to each of my
articles on the Eagle Flyer web site.

Here's how it works.

As with any Perl or cgi (common gateway interface) program,
you have to "call" the script by adding a line similar to the
one below, somewhere in the web page that you want to make
"printer friendly".

(a href="http://www.eagleflyer.com/cgi-bin/masterpfp.cgi
?doc=http://www.eagleflyer.com/test/mpfptest.html")Click here
for printer friendly page(/a)

The first part of the link, ending in masterpfp.cgi calls
the script. The ?doc= plus the following link tell the
script the exact location of the page to be printed.

As it stands, the above link will not work.

I deliberately split the line and used "(" and ")" instead
of "<" and ">" so that you would be able to see the whole
thing on your screen. In reality, there should be no "line
breaks" between the .cgi and the ?doc and between the
words "Click here" and "for printer".

In addition to the line that calls the script, you will need to
add a couple more lines somewhere in your web page,
to let the script know exactly what you want to print.

The lines look like the following:

(!-- BEGIN_PRINTER_FRIENDLY_COPY --) to start printing
and (!-- END_PRINTER_FRIENDLY_COPY --) to end, again
using "<" and ">" instead of the "(" and ")" shown here.

If you look at my test page for this script, located at: mfptest
you will see the Eagle Computers logo, followed by nine
lines of text and the link to the "printer friendly" page.

When you click the link, you will see the page to be
printed, displayed in a new browser window.

You will notice that by using two sets of the "begin" and
"end" links, I was able to customize the printed page, so
that the logo and three of the nine lines of text are not
included in the new "printer friendly" page.

By selectively using the begin and end tags, (as many as
you like) you can be very specific about what gets printed.

There is even a feature in the script that allows you to
customize the way that you display the images in the page.

If you try this script, be sure to set the permissions to
755 (read/write/execute, read/execute, read/execute) and
watch that the name of the script is spelled correctly.

Some ftp "clients", like WS_FTP can force the name to be
changed to lower case, and then your script won't work.

As with all of the scripts, both commercial and no-cost,
that you will find at "Willmaster.com", I highly suggest
that you take a look at this great tool.

Grab your copy here: Master PFP Script

Ralph Moore, Editor - Eagle Flyer Newsletter - Get No-Cost
Software, Reports, Bonuses! subscribe@eagleflyer.com
or visit the Eagle Flyer site at: Eagle Flyer
~~~~~~~ Get The No-Cost Email Training Series Below ~~~~~~~
"How, When & Where To Post Your Articles" - "Write Here"(TM)
Training Series - Email: writehere@eagleflyer.com