Printing thumbnails

[spinningrachel]

Hi there.

I currently have most of my images set with a style that uses thumbnails for web output, meaning they appear on screen small or smaller and blurry, until users click on the image and then it pops up and appears large and clear with the nice quality I created in the file itself.

With the same images, when I create PDFs, their max and min sizes are determined in the same style and then they appear nicely in the PDF as well.

However, when I click the Print button from the online output, the image is printed in its poor thumbnail quality.

What can I do to prevent this? My Support people need the option to print single-topic PDF files in order to send only the specific needed information to the clients and has found that sending single-topic PDFs is the most efficient way to do this. Obviously I can't be creating 800 single-topic PDFs.

What's the solution?

Thanks,
rachel

[spinningrachel]

Anyone?

[Lydia]

Hi Rachel,
hope, I'm not telling old news here. When printing from the web, the style settings of the "print" medium will be used. Which medium do you use for the PDF file? If that is not the "print" medium I would copy the settings from the PDF medium into the "print" medium to get the same effect.
BR, Lydia.

[NorthEast]

I don't think you can set a thumbnail to automatically expand when you print from a browser.
I'm pretty sure the full-size image is dynamically added to the page using a script (when you click on the image) ; so it's not something you could do by tweaking some of the CSS for the print medium.

How are the two problems connected though - were support going to create the PDFs by printing them from a browser?
If so, why not build a second output, just for support, that is set not to use thumbnails.

[Lydia]

I think, Dave is correct and my approach won't help. I thought that the images would be there in different sizes, but it makes more sense that they are only created when needed.

[spinningrachel]

You guys are awesome. I hadn't even thought of that workaround. Thank you Dave! Worked like a charm.

[pdavidson]

Greetings,

Just want to be sure that I'm correctly understanding this... what was suggested by Dave will not resolve the problem of thumbnails displaying correctly from a topic when selecting the print option from a webpage. Instead, Dave is suggesting that there be a separate PDF file available with the images already formatted for printing. Am I understanding this correctly?

Thanks,
Paul

[NorthEast]

Greetings,

Just want to be sure that I'm correctly understanding this... what was suggested by Dave will not resolve the problem of thumbnails displaying correctly from a topic when selecting the print option from a webpage. Instead, Dave is suggesting that there be a separate PDF file available with the images already formatted for printing. Am I understanding this correctly?

Thanks,
Paul

When you click print from a webpage it'll only print what's actually on that page - so if it's a thumbnail version of an image, it'll only ever print that thumbnail.

I only suggested generating a PDF in this case because the end-goal was to produce PDFs.

If it were my project, I'd not use Flare's thumbnails. Instead, I'd write my own CSS and script to handle this. For example, I'd limit the image width to be smaller for normal/default view (e.g using max-width: 100px), but not limit the image size for the print medium (e.g. max-width: 100%). Then I'd add a small script to toggle the image size when you click on it (e.g. toggle max-width between 100px and 100%), which is about 1 or 2 lines of jQuery.

[devjoe]

There is an option in the target to generate resized copies of scaled images. If you turn off this option, then the thumbnails in the output are the full size images scaled down by the browser. This may result in slightly poorer quality thumbnails (depending on the browser used), but should allow you to use this print medium trick to make them appear at a reasonable size and in good quality in printouts from the browser.

[NorthEast]

There is an option in the target to generate resized copies of scaled images. If you turn off this option, then the thumbnails in the output are the full size images scaled down by the browser. This may result in slightly poorer quality thumbnails (depending on the browser used), but should allow you to use this print medium trick to make them appear at a reasonable size and in good quality in printouts from the browser.

Are you sure about that?

For me, when I switch off Generate Resized copies of scaled images, it does not affect thumbnails - Flare still generates separate smaller versions of the image for the thumbnail; e.g. the img src points to image_thumb_0_64.png instead of the full size image.png.

AFAIK, that setting only applies to images you resize, i.e. by setting a size for the individual image, or setting sizes via CSS.