Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Html Newsletters - One Small Problem

Posted by Anonymous on 6/22/2004 at 7:10 PM ET 250 Points
We produce around 26 html newsletters each month. They're great...interactive, immediate delivery, easy to produce, cost-effective, etc. Only one small problem...they don't translate well to a print format. And that's a problem because even though they're electronic newsletters, our professionals still like to use them as part of a hard copy marketing package. Any suggestions on how to convert html to a print format that's professional looking, without the onus of recreating the newsletter in Quark?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 6/22/2004 at 7:32 PM Member
    Have you looked into the advantages of PHP?
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 6/22/2004 at 7:35 PM Member
    You could include a link inside the newsletter which says something like 'printer ready format', and then bring them to a printer format (could be another HTML or maybe a PDF). Many of the web newsletters I get (Including MarketingProfs - check out the articles on this site) use this format.

    Of course, this is additional work. You will have to create 2 versions of each newsletter - an email ready version and a print ready version.
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 6/22/2004 at 8:30 PM Member
    AprilGuy beat me to it - move from HTML to PDF. This isn't as easy for someone reading online (takes longer to load, etc.), but can look very professional.

    SteveB mentioned PHP. PHP is a programming language for the web. He'll have to provide details about how it could be used to improve the format in both online and print formats.
  • Posted by Blaine Wilkerson on 6/22/2004 at 10:34 PM Member
    Can you send me a copy of a newsletter so I can see why it won't print? It may not be the newsletters.

    Just click on my name to get my email address.

    I'll look at the code and print it off to see what is wrong.

    Thanks!

    P.S. Be sure to put "MarketingProfs Question" in the subject line.
  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 6/23/2004 at 3:31 PM Member
    PHP is an “open source” programming language. There are libraries of pre-written scripts available for free that can save time and money in solving programming issues of this nature. You can accomplish the same goals with ASP, Cold Fusion or whatever. There are probably several ways to solve this problem, I can’t tell you which is best.

    https://www.php.net/

    Good luck
  • Posted by telemoxie on 6/29/2004 at 1:47 AM Member
    When I had researched this about a year ago, we came up with a possible solution, but the cure seemed worse than the problem...

    ... if I'm remembering this correctly, it seems that HTML is a subset of SGML optimized for screen display, and that the repository for printing info (among other things) was in SGML. Although HTML started as a stripped down version, development work continued on HTML, but not too much has apparently been done with SGML... especially as folk move towards XML...

    ..And so an obvious choice would be to convince all your editors to store their work in SGML format, so that the source documents could contain info for both screen and print formatting...

    We were starting to look for a design and editing system which could output in either HTML, SGML or PDF format, and would hopefully have a common repository for fonts, margins, etc... but the idea of asking all the editors to give up their favorite program just seemed too much trouble.

    If this sort of approach sounds attractive to you, I'd be happy to recontact my technical sources to see what they've learned about this issue in the past year. Good luck.
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