Inclusive Design Guides for duplexed card output

 Goal

• Enable direct-from-web printing of the Inclusive Design Guide website
• Output should be like the PDF files produced before:
  • 2 cards per page and double-sided

Example

Web view

Print format

Automating Duplex Layout

The following is a rough draft of a possible automated solution:

Author writes content and manually inserts a token where they want the front and back of the card to be split.

Parser goes through each raw content page (i.e. written in markdown and html) and split the page into two.

Using a template, render two pairs of front pages side-by-side (this could be an HTML template, and two sections side by side)

Find the matching back pages and put them side by side but in reverse order

Old Notes

• Handling page breaks
  • Author needs to specify page breaks in the source
  • If doing print CSS:
    
    • Use handlebars to inject page break elements
    • the content author does this manually by putting a call to a handlebars function within the markdown file.
• If doing direct from web printing (straight HTML output to printer), the source content needs to be 2 cards per page as well
  • This would mean we will need to generate content that is 2 cards per page - currently the site just displays 1 card at a time.
• In order to print 2 cards per page properly duplexed, the corresponding reverse side of the:
  
  • left card appears on the right on the second page
  • right card appears on the left on the second page
  • this means that to do duplex properly, when a page break is inserted, the 2nd page should reverse the order of the back pages.

• A simpler case would be to print 1 card per page, duplexed.
  • the output page dimensions in this case would be 5.5" x 8.5", to do this using CSS you would use the size attribute.
    • but size CSS attribute is only supported by Firefox currently.
  • alternative approach is to fix the size of the content container
    • this is the current approach being used in testing.

Other remarks

• A content author will not know if their content fits properly onto one side of a card until they print or print preview their content.