When was the last time you tried to put something digital onto a piece of paper?
It's not very difficult right? As it shouldn't be, we live in the future! Take a document, click print and voila, the magical elves in a plastic box do their magic and you get a lovely piece of paper with some crap on it.
If you don't have a box of elves of your own, you take it to the nearest person who does, pay them the price of a tenth of gum and they do it for you.
But sometimes you want to do this in a more sophisticated manner. Perhaps your target paper size isn't A4, perhaps you're doing something that can't just be whisked up in your favourite Word clone. Maybe, just maybe, you aren't producing the content, maybe you have a form somewhere on the interwebs that people can fill out.
As I found out last night and this morning, that bit isn't too simple.
Last night I set out on the monumental task of preparing the second batch of Postme.me's for printing. I was once told that everybody in the world uses something called InDesign to do this, hell, I used it to set up the first batch.
But it was 18 cards this time, that's a bit much to do by hand isn't it? I'm a lazy programmer after all and my kind cowers before menial tasks like nobody's business!
I will automate this!, I thought.
The fuck I will.
After spending five minutes getting the database to export as a shiny XML I spent upwards of two hours trying to figure out how to convince InDesign to import said XML. Yes, it does haz the capabilities, no they don't help ... or maybe I just can't think like a designer and that's why nothing made sense.
I mean come on, you tag all the fields, you get all the data to import and be properly tagged ... but it just does not want to fill the template. It could at least help with the menial tasks. Nope, Fuck you! I will reset all your fonts and colours to a magical default. Problem?
InDesign was trolling me on purpose, I swear!
Oh but what's this, browsers have a shiny print to PDF feature don't they? Maybe I can just export as nice HTML and get a browser to print it into a PDF and be done with it.
Yeah, fuck that too. Turns out no matter how hard I tried it is virtually impossible to convince any browser to print without margins. Even setting up a custom paper size that explicitly defines zero margins ... nope. The closest browser to come to cracking the problem was Chromium on Linux ... things only got screwy around page 15 ... and only got worse henceforth.
Chromium on Mac indeed has an actual working marginless feature. But it only supports A4 directly, use the OS's print screen and the marginless feature magically vanishes, but you do get different paper sizes.
And it only gets worse.
Tried a number of different programs and libraries to export a piece of nicely formatted modern-ish HTML to PDF and nothing worked. Either the paper sizes were off (but the margins were alright) or the font didn't render correctly.
In the end, after at least five hours of trying different things, I broke down and did it by hand. Copy pasted all the images and all the text into an InDesign file ...
... it took 20 minutes.
Hat's off to all the designers of the world who do this stuff on a daily basis.
Continue reading about The strange world of getting user data onto a piece of paper
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- Webdevs, you have no idea how much you know
- Why you should never write a book in .doc
- Different medium, different mindset
- WebPutty will make your CSS cry virgin unicorn tears of awesome
- postme.me - idea to sales in 3 days
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below 👇
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️