This is a very short explanation of what the HTML Printer is, what it can do, and what it can't do.
What is it?
The HTML Printer is a printer driver that goes into your System Folder (System 7 only!). Using SimpleText (the only tested application so far), type a document using your choice of fonts, sizes, and styles. Then with HTML Printer chosen as your current printer (using the Chooser), print the document. An HTML file will be generated for you.
What can it do?
Text Style
This version of HTML Printer supports the following HTML text style commands:
bold
italics
fixed width fonts (using courier or monoco)
You can even mix these to create bold italics, for example.
Fonts
The following HTML plus (level 3) style tags are supported. Note that not all browsers support level 3 tags. It appears that Netscape 1.1b3 does not support these tags.
Times Roman
Blinking Text
One of the cooler level 3 tags is blinking text. Set any text using the , and Netscape will flash that text on and off repeatedly.
Font Sizes
Font sizes are another level 3 tag that is supported. Sizes that may be used are:
9 point
10 point
12 point
14 point
18 point
24 point
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Other Commands
You can even use HTML commands within your document. These will be passed through unchanged to your HTML file.
Horizontal Bar
If two or more underscores appear at the start of a line, a horizontal bar gets written to the HTML file. The underscores and any text that appears after them do not get saved.
Links
Links are perhaps the most impotant aspect of HTML. The HTML Printer implements two types of links for you. The first, and the simpliest, is a link to another file. You specify the other file name within double quotes, and then follow (or precede) it with some text that you'd like the user to click on to execute that link. All of the filename and the text must be underlined, and there should be no other styles used in between the filename and the text.
The other type of link is to another part of the same file, and is implemented in a manner similar to the link described above. Instead of a filename, you specify a label, and insert a pound sign "#" before the first quote. The desination of the link should use the pound sign instead of quotes. The Table of Contents above is an example of this kind of link.
What can't it do?
First, this is a very early development version, so don't try to use it without saving your document first.
If your document has headers and footers, these won't come out properly in html. SimpleText puts page numbers in the footer, and those will come out in the middle of your document, since HTML has no concept of pages. Remember that in HTML you are dealing with one long scroll.
The HTML Printer has a little trouble understanding ends of paragraphs. Your HTML document will look pretty much like the original, except that there's no way to know if the paragraph or line break command should be used. So every paragraph gets a blank line between it and the next paragraph.
This version does not support in-line graphics, sounds, and video. I hope to do that in a future release.
If you have imbedded less than or greater than signs, they will be passed through to the html file and potentially misinterpreted by your browser. This will be fixed in a future release.
I haven't done much testing with page ranges, scaling, and page orientation, so take caution.
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Text sizes have not yet been implemented. I expect to be able to do something with this, but support will be limited.
Lastly, please excuse the lame icon. I drew it in about five seconds. It's supposed to be a spider. Get it? Spider? Webs? In any case, I really do have the ability to do good icons, and I have done good icons in past projects. Let's just say that a future release will have a better icon.
If you have any comments, suggestions, bones to pick, please email me. You might want to generate html from this file, and use the mail link below to create and send the email.
Have Fun!
Rick
Click here to load Rick's Home Page
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