We're off to Melbourne on Sunday, and I'll pick up the power supply from CPL on the way. I have the address in my GPS navigator, but to be on the safe side it made sense to print out the location info page.
What a catastrophe! I don't know what it is about this page, but it took me about 10 attempts before I got anything even remotely resembling a copy of the page:
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Firefox created a file that was completely illegible. It appears to have chosen its own fonts reminiscent of early dot-matrix printers:
I've seen this before, and it seemed to be related to something in my firefox configuration, but I never found out what. On other profiles it printed correctly; but not today.
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So I tried Opera, printing to a file. Even worse:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~/public_html/Day/20120920 30 -> ghostview opera.ps
Segmentation fault: 11 (core dumped)=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~/public_html/Day/20120920 31 -> file opera.ps
opera.ps: PostScript document text conforming DSC level 3.0, Level 3
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I don't normally use chrome for printing, because it insists in printing only in PDF. But in this case I had little choice, so I printed to a file and converted it to PostScript. That worked, and the text was legiblebut the map was missing!
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On IRC Michael Ralston, the resident troll, suggested using Microsoft Internet Explorer . Under the circumstances, that wasn't such a bad idea, so I tried it with my evaluation version of Microsoft Windows 8. Of course, I had no printer set up, but IE offered to do it for meonly it didn't see the network printer. I had to go to the Control Panel to set it up. Returning to IE, it still didn't see the printer. I had to restart it, in the process getting into a full-screen display that I couldn't get rid of. It swallowed all the data, then went back to idle without printing. The second time I saw on the printer control panel: Ignore data . My best guess is that Microsoft installed an incompatible driver.
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Next I tried on Apple. It didn't pretend to recognize a Brother HL2700-CN printer, but it did offer Generic PostScript , and that at least printed. But the layout was all wrong, and the map was partially blanked out. The latter seems to have something to with the driver. Spent some time trying to find out out how to get Safari to print to a file (hint: it's under the button labelled PDF ):
The map in the file looked normal enough, though the page was nearly double the width of the paper.
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Finally I started a firefox from lagoon, Yvonne's computer, finding a spare display so that firefox wouldn't try to start a local version, and tried printing. Success! For small values of success . The left-hand bar was completely missing, but the information I needed was still there.
So: we've been using printers on computers for decades. Surely it should be simpler to print out web pages. I could use a screen grabber and print out the visible part of the page, but surely a print function should be better, not worse.
And yes, I'm sure that the page in question is broken. But that doesn't explain my biggest problem, the first version of the firefox output. I'm baffled.