RE: [Palindrome] printer program

["Scott Purdy" <smpurdy comcast net>]

I was mentioning a similar idea to some of the other members. I know that 
my
laptop can print each of the individual puzzles to a PDF, which can then be
pasted together to get a single, collated file which can be printed as many
times as necessary. I imagine I'm not the only team member with a full copy
of Acrobat on their laptop, but it really only needs to be done on one
computer. Acrobat can also run most of the process suggested by Ken's first
suggestion (you would still have to hit print after you were done), but you
run the risk of getting page breaks in odd places, because it isn't making
the PDF specifically with printing in mind as my suggestion would. Also, if
(as last year, IIRC) there is a password protected login, Acrobat can't get
through that.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: palindrome-bounces cosmos phy tufts edu
[mailto:palindrome-bounces cosmos phy tufts edu]On Behalf Of Ken Olum
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2004 12:51 PM
To: palindrome cosmos phy tufts edu
Subject: [Palindrome] printer program


Here is a way that some work now might save some frustration later.
The usual situation is that puzzles are released in batches on the
web, with each puzzle consisting of one or several web pages.  We want
to print lots of copies of all the puzzles in a batch when they are
released.  The usual way to do it is to tell the printer to print N
copies of each web page and then to collate them by hand.  I've always
found that process somewhat frustrating, and I think it would be nice
to have a system for doing it automatically.

Here are some ideas:

Write a stand-alone program which would take a URL, find all the
pages that are under it, and print them.

Write a proxy server which would do the same thing, but return the
result as a single web page.

In either case, one should worry about whatever sort of authorization
might be necessary to obtain the pages, whether it would require
logging into (and thus running the program on) Athena, and so on.

Another idea is to print each page by hand but use "print to file"
which will produce some file that can then be sent to the printer.
When all such files are put in a directory, a very simple program
("lpr *.ps" in the case of Linux) would then print the files
together.  Even this procedure should probably be checked out ahead of
time, though, perhaps by testing it on the past year's hunt.

                         Ken


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