Anyone attempted web-to-print?

[Rata]

I’m curious if anyone out there has attempted to connect a website to a dead-tree-paper newsletter…

Picture this: Client organisation has a CMS and puts all their ‘news’ content in. Monthly they need to generate a paper newsletter… They push ONE BUTTON and a pdf, at least as beautiful as the site, is generated with all of their news content… No need to do any copy and pasting between web and other apps…

Obviously, whenever something is automated, you will loose fine-grained control, but for an client with limited skills/human resources, it could be a godsend.

Has anyone out there attempted this? Very interested to hear any experiences or comments.

[Rata]

Yes images are a problem, but larger office-size printers do an amazing job at making 72 dpi images look OK.

There is also no way to accurately map html to a paper size (as far as I know…) If only there was a sub-set of CSS that you could define things in millimetres…

I’ve looked at connecting InDesign to a database, and it looks like a big bag of hurt.

I am working on a solution for a primary school and I have template that pulls out all of the content and produces a layout that gets 90% of the way there. Using css3 column flow works surprisingly well, only you must generate the pdf from FireFox, as Safari breaks cc3 column flow on ‘print’…

The main problem is where the columns break.

It’s not perfect, but it miles better than the newsletter they now make by hand. And they only have to enter there content once now… no more copy and paste into all the different buckets…

[nixnerd]

Also, most web Graphics are RGB and print is CMYK. You could probably write software to do all these conversion but then the question must be asked: Is it easier to develop a system like that… or just make newsletters?

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