Highwire bridges Web content printing gap

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There's no doubt about it, Web browsers weren't designed to make printing Web content easy or effective. The problem is that the process of rendering a document in a browser window has a totally different set of constraints than a layout designed for a sheet of paper.

Even the basic attributes of an online layout such as color fills in HTML tables can be lost when your browser sends the content to your printer. When the browser page is wider than the printer's output, the content is simply ignored. All in all, printing Web content has been a real pain.

But all is not lost. A server-side tool from Corda Technologies (see links below) called Highwire is available to solve this problem. To use Highwire you create well-formed HTML or XHTML content that includes Corda's Highwire specific tags that define print time attributes such as how headers, column headers, and footers of tables that span multiple pages will be handled and which document sections should be excluded.

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There's no doubt about it, Web browsers weren't designed to make printing Web content easy or effective. The problem is that the process of rendering a document in a browser window has a totally different set of constraints than a layout designed for a sheet of paper.

Even the basic attributes of an online layout such as color fills in HTML tables can be lost when your browser sends the content to your printer. When the browser page is wider than the printer's output, the content is simply ignored. All in all, printing Web content has been a real pain.

But all is not lost. A server-side tool from Corda Technologies (see links below) called Highwire is available to solve this problem. To use Highwire you create well-formed HTML or XHTML content that includes Corda's Highwire specific tags that define print time attributes such as how headers, column headers, and footers of tables that span multiple pages will be handled and which document sections should be excluded.

Using the included Corda Embedder utility you then build a Web application that sends the page's content to the Corda Server. The Corda Server takes the various specifications and generates a PDF file that faithfully renders the required look and feel that you want the print document to have.

Highwire also makes some intelligent adjustments to the PDF output. For example, Highwire will attempt to adjust fonts and other design elements so that the Web page fits into a single PDF page or, if this is not possible, appropriately for multiple pages.

The product supports most features of Cascading Style Sheets, handles complex nested tables and preserves hyperlinks in the output PDF document. Corda has put a lot of work into ensuring that the generated PDF documents are Section 508 Compliant.

Finally, Highwire also provides a lot of security features that ensure the privacy of generated PDF documents can be controlled, and includes support for caching, clustering, and server failover.

To get an idea of Highwire's capabilities check out the company's 401K report example as well as the other demos.

Highwire is written in Java and runs on Windows 98/NT4.0 or higher (2000 recommended), Mac OS X 10.1 or higher, Solaris 2.6 or higher, and Unix or Linux compatible systems. Pricing is $6,495 for the single threaded version and $14,500 for the multi-threaded version.

This is a very impressive product and bridges the gap between on-screen and printer rendition better than any other product I have come across.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.