In early 2015 Will Hertling of HP and a cadre of like-minded developers decided that the world needed a developer community dedicated to printing. In February of that year, they created www.print-dev.com, an unofficial Wordpress site. Print-dev proved immediately useful and popular.
When HP rolled out a company-wide Developers Portal 10 months later, we preserved the print-dev.com website, renaming it as Printing Fundamentals for Developers. Visitors to the old print-dev.com site bounc to the Printing Fundamentals page on the new all-HP portal. That means the tips and tutorials that Will and others pulled together have been preserved.
As we say farewell to Will's Wordpress site, let's remember his original announcement of the Print Dev Community:
The Print Developers Community is a new site focusing on helping software developers who are integrating printing functionality into web, mobile, or PC applications.
We’ve noticed that developers sometimes have a hard time finding people to answer their questions about printing in other developer communities. By creating a forum focused solely on print, we hope to solve that problem. We noticed that sometimes there are gaps in developer documentation, especially when it comes to good cross-platform ways to handle print, or the question of the best way to present content formatted for print. We’re creating a tutorials area for these topics. Of course, we don’t want to duplicate what’s out there, so we’re gathering links to some of the best content on printing that already exists.
The core team behind the Print Developers Community are HP employees, but we’re open to all discussions about improving print.
Will's Code Tutorials
Here are Will's code tutorials that we have migrated to Print Fundamentals for Developers on the HP Developers' Portal
- Using PDF to make webpages print beautifully
- Generating PDFs from HTML for non-web applications (like book layout)
- Printing with CSS and Media Queries
Will's blog and forum posts
- Printing from a web app directly to a printer
- Selecting regions of a webpage to print
- Printing HTML headers and footers
- Web printing in landscape
- In-browser preview of print CSS
Thanks for the kickstart, Will. We will preserve your open, egalitarian spirit as we support and grow the Print Developer Community on the HP Developers' Portal. We will be looking for you in the Forum.
Monetize client content with printing
Stephanie O'Day (better knowns as the "Crock Pot Lady") added printable Menu Plans for a fee. The result was a steady flow of new-found money from printing.
"Crock Pot Lady monetizes recipes with Menu Plan printables."
Stephanie was delighted. "Of all the different ways I have monetized my blog, printables were the easiest and the most no-brainer.”
The Skipper