Printing Hints and Tips

While there are countless websites which provide parsimonious abstracts, heavily condensed synopses, predigested summaries of medical-research material, and articles devoid of their figures and tables or otherwise incomplete, the Knee Library brings you the real thing -- complete with every word of text, every figure, every table, and every reference. This means you will encounter full-length studies and other documents of a size and depth that you might find more amenable to reading in printed form (as well as pondering with a pencil in hand). With this in mind, here are some suggestions for converting the digital into the tangible.

First of all, the Knee Library has been designed from the beginning to be both computer-friendly and printer-friendly. All pages viewed on-screen are directly printable, with no extra steps required. The highly efficient plain HTML coding (done manually instead of via black-box canned software packages), together with a deliberate avoidance of ornamentation, makes all this possible. Additionally, the no-nonsense static allocation of individual webpages means that the URLs of the articles do not change over time, and so the URL of an article viewed on a given computer at a given point in time will be the same if the article is viewed elsewhere some time later. The simple and intuitive layout, combined with the transparent and tree-like database structure, makes it easy to find what you need via whichever route (author, topic, keyword search, date of addition to the library, etc.) you prefer. There is no software thicket, and no confusing tangle of dynamically-allocated URLs.

If you desire any of the documents on this site in tangible form, and especially if you wish to print numerous documents, please be environmentally considerate and use a printer that is equipped with an automatic duplexing (double-sided printing) feature. Most of the printers from Xerox (Phaser, DocuPrint series) and Canon (including all the Hewlett-Packard LaserJets) have this capability, as do many models from Samsung, Kyocera-Mita, Konica-Minolta, Brother, Sharp, Matsushita (Panasonic), Océ, Heidelberg, Ricoh and other firms. Some inkjet printers also have this feature. Note that network-connected digital copiers almost always come standard with duplex-printing capabilities. So, in most cases, you all need to do is to select the feature via the equipment's software drivers. (However, you might have to first tell the software that an accessory duplexer is present. For Windows users, this might require a bit of digging under Start/Settings/Printers. Select the printer, then choose Printer/Properties/Device Settings, or Advanced.)

By printing double-sided, you will not only conserve a lot of paper, but you will save yourself filing space as well.

Please note that in many articles, the figures appear in large size in order to show all detail satisfactorily on-screen. If you print these articles on standard letter-size or A4 paper with the default portrait orientation, you might encounter cases where the figures spill onto additional pages. Because most web browsers (by default) print documents as if the material were sliced vertically, you might find that some of the largest figures will be truncated on the right-hand side. (Pursuant to a September 5/05 formatting-setup revision, this should be less of an issue. The Knee Library now uses plain full-width screen displaying, instead of the centred arrangement that the Kneeboard discussion forum employs. The revision ensures that most of the figures will fit nicely on standard-width paper.)

Users who find figures to be too small when displayed might wish to turn off their browser's automatic image-resizing feature. (In Microsoft Internet Explorer, perhaps the most widely used browser today as a result of Bill Gates's efforts, choose Tools/Internet Options/Advanced. Under Multimedia, turn off "Enable Automatic Image Resizing".)

As with all printing of documents, please make it a habit to always preview documents prior to submitting a print job (e.g. File/Print Preview for Microsoft Internet Explorer users). For users of low-bandwidth dial-up connections, please note that (with most browsers) print previewing must be done after the document has finished downloading in its entirety. If you try to preview a print job and the previewed page appears blank, try again once all the figures have finished downloading.

Note, too, that previewing can save you paper by allowing you to only print the pages you need. For example, if a given article takes 11 pages to print, the actual text-and-figures portion of the article might only be 10 pages. The 11th page might only have a few lines on it (and these would merely be the webpage footer, which is the same for every article anyway). By indicating (usually under Print Properties) that you only want pages 1-10 printed, you can save the cost of printing the 11th page. Additionally, you can save paper by reducing the margins (using under Print Setup or Page Setup). This enables you to get more on each page. If you are printing a substantial number of articles, the savings could be substantial.

If you find that certain large figures, when printed, run widthwise over one page, first try reducing the page margins. Or, try printing in landscape format. You could also try landscape format with legal-size paper. If you have access to a large-format (ledger/tabloid-capable) laser printer, you can try printing on 11"×17" paper in portrait format. But keep in mind that such large paper can be cumbersome to manage and file. Also, remember that longer lines of text tend to be more difficult to read, simply because longer lines make it more difficult to the human eye to find the subsequent line.

Remember, too, that you always have the option of printing only certain portions of a given document. Windows users could, for example, highlight (by clicking and dragging your mouse) a given figure or portion of the document, and then select (under Print), the "Print Selection" option. Or, you could print-preview the document and then print, on large-size paper or in landscape format, only the pages that contain the oversized images...and thus you could print the remaining pages with the standard page settings. With a little ingenuity, you can quickly tailor your printing to the document at hand. This approach, which is far more elegant than merely blindly clicking on some print icon, will save you both money and filing space. So, taking a moment to preview the document and arrange the page setup (and also the printing settings) will save you the hassle and waste of having to reprint a document just to "get it right".

Note that when viewing Knee Library pages (either on-line of off-line) with a web browser, simply resizing the window will make the lines match the width of the window. If your computer has a large screen, you might wish to make the window smaller, in order to ensure that the text lines are of comfortable width. Note that such window resizing will not affect how the document prints. (Internet Explorer users can change displayed font size under View/Text Size. Please note that changing the font size displayed will also change the size of font as printed. Again, to be sure that what you are seeing on the screen corresponds to what you want on paper, make certain to preview the document before printing.)

In summary, the no-nonsense plain-HTML coding of the Knee Library gives you full control over both line width and font size, in both the printed and on-screen-displayed realms. It takes only a moment to familiarize yourself with these attributes and to adjust them for both comfortable viewing and hassle-free printing.

As an alternative to printing, if you wish to download articles for your personal off-line use, you might consider saving documents entirely electronically. (In Internet Explorer, this is easily done using File/Save As.) This would save you the cost of printing and filing the resulting paper output. And, it would also enable you to search the documents locally (i.e. without being on-line). All Knee Library files are easily saveable, and so there is never any worry about unpleasant surprises when you try to view the saved files locally (in contrast to what you will often find with websites where the coding has been generated by canned black-box software packages such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage). Furthermore, the fact that all Knee Library file names are free of spaces makes such saving easy for users of Unix/Linux-based platforms such as SCO, Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, Slackware, SuSE, Free BSD, Open BSD, Debian, Sun Solaris, and Canonical Ubuntu.

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Printing Hints and Tips