Printing Accurate "On-Screen" Internet Pages

[mistersmith]

Hey, I had a client that needed an "accurate" printout of a few webpages we'd created. The pages have a few frame-type things going on, some header stuff, and when they're printed from IE the software takes the main frame, jacks it up to the top left, then tacks all the other frames on to the end. That won't work, we need hardcopies of the way they look on-screen.

I used Print Screen to take snapshots of the pages, then stitched them together in Photoshop. I made the final jpegs 8 inches wide so they'd fill up a printed page, and figured that would be cool. Except...

I can't print in color from the one computer we have with Photoshop on it. So I emailed the final files to myself, and opened them on my computer where -- wait for it -- I don't have Photoshop, or photo software of any kind. We're not exactly a graphic design firm.

So now I have photo files about 8 inches wide by about 20-30 inches tall. What the hell can I do to print them out at their actual widths, on 2-3 sheets of paper. I tried importing them to Word, it makes everything fit on one page vertically, and stupid Office Picture Manager prints at an ungodly low quality -- you can't even read the text.

Any ideas?

[loco]

What program where they created in?

-loco

[mistersmith]

The original webpages were created with our own stuff. We do everything, from original content creation to the final product transmission all over the world in all kinds of formats. I can't be more specific or send a link, because I can get fired for talking about my job on the internet. Yay!

But I'm viewing the page in IE 7 (actually 7.0.5730) so if you know a way to force IE to print what's actually there instead of what it wants to print, that would be awesome.

[loco]

That still doesn't help.

I was going say save as a PDF and print if you where using a vector program like Illustrator or Corel.

What resolution are you working in 72, 100, 200 etc..

I had a problem awhile back, I did a logo as a freelance thing. Where I would send him the file (email). Everytime the guy went to print the file the color was always changing. I couldn't understand why.
I final asked him if he was printing out of Photoshop, Illustrator or something like that. Turned out he was printing it out a program like PAINT. He ended up printing it out of Illutrator and he said it was perfect.

-loco

[swampviking]

He's looking at printing high quality mini-posters to frame.

[mistersmith]

Yeah stupid gigposters.com keeps changing the page, gonna make them really hard to cut up with sharp corners...

But for real, loco, I really appreciate it, but you're really overthinking it. The page is just text, with a frame on the left and a frame at the top...except when you go "CTRL-P" in Explorer, it automatically adjusts the frames so they're both at the bottom. The text is prioiritized...99% of the time that's perfect, as any hard copy would be purely about the text, but in this instance I wanted to print exactly as Explorer showed it on-screen. Hence the stitched screenshots.

I don't think there's a way, because I think the webpage is hard-coded to do what it does.

[Hrabovsky]

Screen grab and print?

[Casey Burns]

yeah ... are you unable to take screenshots or something?

[Brute666]

Download GIMP. It's open-source (free) and similar enough to Pshop that you should be able to stitch and print from any computer you want to. The latest version is only 15mb so you could put it on a flashdrive to load it if needed.

[danstiles]

export to a format that your other machine can print. PDF. Or even make a jpeg and print it from a browser window.