I’ve written about turning your blog into a book, now it’s time to talk about printing your blog out as a book. Ah! Something a little different.
A List Apart’s tutorial, “Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!”, takes you step-by-step through the process of taking your pretty web page design and printing out your blog like a book. Very cool.
Can CSS be used for serious print jobs? To find out, we decided to take the ultimate challenge: to produce the next edition of our book directly from HTML and CSS files. In this article we sketch our solution and quote from the style sheet used. Towards the end we describe the book microformat (boom!) we developed in the process…
…A printed book has many features not seen on screens. There are page numbers, headers and footers, a table of contents, and an index. The content must be split into pages of fixed size, and cross-references within the book (for example, “see definition on page 35”) must be resolved. Finally, the content must be converted to PDF, which is sent to the printer.
Web browsers are good at dealing with pixels on a screen, but not very good at printing.
Site Search Tags: book, blog, print, printing, CSS, HTML, paged+media, publish, stylesheet, blog+into+book, author, write, writing
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
22 Comments
Wow…Its a cool idea of taking web page design and printing out the blog like a book. Its gr8
is it possible to print from blogger? I want to be able to print into a book form so its like a journal/scrapbook for my family. Am I stuck since I have been on blogger?
@ danielle:
You mean “Blogger” as in Google Blogspot blogs? You’ll have to ask someone who knows about that blogging service.
Yes, I am wondering the same thing about “Blogger”. I would like to print my blog like a scrapbook with pictures and text as a gift for my father who does not use a computer. If anyone gets an answer or solution on this, I would sure appreciate the info. Thanks.
You can print from “Blogger” for about $20 by going to blog2print.com.
I want to print from “blogspot”–any suggestions? Blog2print doesn’t support blogspot. JSH
@ Judy Hudson:
I’m not familiar with how Blogspot/Blogger works. You will have to ask their customer support, but printing from “any” web page is a matter of hitting the print button and hoping the website designer used a CSS printing stylesheet to make it look good when it prints.
Good luck.
thank you so much for posting this!!!! i have been searching for somewhere to print my blog!!!!!!!!! (and blog2print supports blogspot!)
I just want to print out my blog and can’t find a vehicle that supports wordpress blogs!
Can you help point me in the right direction??
Depends upon what you want to print and how. There are several book publishing sites which will take WordPress blog content and help you convert it into books. If you just want to print out a few pages, then hit print. If it doesn’t print pretty, then get a print.css stylesheet into your WordPress Theme. See Styling for Print on the WordPress Codex for help.
If you want to add the ability for others to print pages on your WordPress blog, see WordPress Plugins That Play With Paper and Documents.
Is that helpful?
nice idea,
but i have question over possiblety of writing in two or three languages.
regards
Amir Mojiri
If you do not ask it, I can’t help you. However, if you need WordPress.com specific help, do try the WordPress.com support forum.
I would like to print my blog into a professional looking book. I’ve looked into blurb.com, but their software Booksmart didn’t “slurp” my pictures in, so I will have to manually load them into the book. I found a way to save my wordpress blog as a PDF file, but I want my book to look professional and bound into a hard cover book, not just printed off pages. Any suggestions on companies/websites that support wordpress or if wordpress offers the option of creating a professional looking book?
If you want a professional looking book, then export all your posts and import them into a word processor or book publishing software and start editing and cleaning things up. Professional books aren’t created from blogs. You don’t make great tasting fudge from mud. It takes the right ingredients and tools to make great fudge, and great books.
A dear friend of mine died recently and there are literally hundreds of people around the world who are mourning his passing. (He was an incredible adventurer and traveller, as well as being a reknowned kayaker and rock climber.) We would like to find a way to use a web site to allow many people to each upload stories and photos, and then eventually print that all out as a book, so that we all have something permanent we can treasure. As far as i can tell, the various blog sites and publishing technologies/products (blogger, wordpress, blog2print) are really intended to allow one person to publish a series of blog entries, rather than being very useful for a group project like this. Am I missing anything? Because it’s such a large and distributed group, there has to be a good measure of “quick and easy” as opposed to allowing us to make the world’s most aesthetic book.
Thanks so much in advance for any insights you can offer.
I think its great idea because there are lots of person in many country who don’t to about computet and internet…
I think its great idea because there are lots of person in many country who don’t know about computer and internet…
An interesting approach – and with a number of sites now allowing you to print on demand i guess its better than just using the copier. UK bloggers will probably be familiar with the various print on demand suppliers so i won’t plug them here.
Making your own blog into a book is a good idea – you can even then sell the book from the blog. The quality of the print is important though, as you want to offer a good product at the end of the day.
Hi Color Printing,
yes it is not trivial, but it certainly is possible to print your blog as a book. There are a number of companies doing that. You might want to check out blurb, blog2print or our company Feedfabrik. Then judge yourself which one you prefer.
We do not use MS Word or anything like that in the background. Our printing is based on a professional typesetting machine to get the look and feel of a “real” book. For self-hosted WordPress we have a plugin that provides you with a new “print” button in the admin interface.
I hope this helps.
This is an interesting service. I want my blog to be turned into book as well. Actually, I am interested in making ebooks to sell. However, I no enough time to learn how to make ebooks and how to market them.
WordPerfect, Word, and many word processing programs will now export into HTML or PDF. Who has time to learn anything anymore when software does it for you. This is an article from many years ago, before ebooks gained popularity.
Great idea, maybe i should try to make one… Since I have my own printing machine. Thanks for the post Lorelle!
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