We just finished a great workshop week @HEAR Strasbourg on the topic of printing HTML.

Printing HTML is not a new idea, but in the last few years we’ve been compiling sets of tools and scripts to properly use HTML as a base for proper layout. This idea has taken on several flavors over different projects, the first serious one being the Balsamine program for the 2013-2014 season.

Since that first successful experiment, the HTML print workflow has extended and been used to control print outputs within Ethertoff, and in situ used for both the Relearn 2013 publication and V/J14 ‘Are you being Served?’ book. Another successful and notable use is this years Balsamine program, displaying all sorts of crispy vector images along side of a more complex layout.

All this preamble culminates in the assembly of all these tools in a boilerplate starter tool, simply named html2print. Hosted in parallel on Git OSP & Github the kit aims to introduce you to the idea of making printable documents from Html, CSS and javascript.

We’ve found many advantages to working this way, so we made it the object of this workshop in Strasbourg with the students from the Communication Graphique department of the school.

Head on over to the blog post on Sürkrüt (comgraph blog) and the schools GH to find all the fun creations and source files.

Miam!