About the Guide to Balloons and Ballooning

About the Guide to Balloons and Ballooning

safety warning Young childern could choke on, or be suffocated by, an uninflated balloon or a piece of broken balloon. Adults should inflate balloons and supervise their use with children under six (6) years. Discard broken balloons immediately.

This Guide is comprised of information extracted from various postings to the mailing lists, and new information is constantly being added to it. Among other things, Mark Balzer (editor-in-chief of the Guide) chooses what is worth saving from the daily emails, and into which chapter the Guide-worthy material goes. But since Mark primarily edits the writings of others, no one person should be credited (or blamed) for the content herein. A list of contributors can be found on the BHQ Contributors Page. If you want to know specifically who said what, you’ll have to search through the mailing list archives.

This Guide and all postings to the mailing lists are freely available to the public. However, they are not in the public domain. That means that while you are free to read this material and use what you have learned in any way you wish, the actual material (writing, drawings, photos) belong to the people who contributed it. Mirrors of any part of the Balloon HQ web site are not allowed without specific written permission. Distribution of this material is restricted to electronic form in the format it exists in here. (Individuals contributors may choose to make their contributions available in other forms.)

Printing Sections of Guide Chapters Without Printing the Whole Chapter

Many Guide users have asked “How can I print a couple of pages from the Guide without having to print an entire 25 page chapter?”

There are a variety of ways to do this but before we give you any helpful answers, we’re going to make you listen to our viewpoint first. You see, we don’t believe in printing web pages. When we want to send printable documents to people, we create word processor documents and send them as email attachments or “distill” them into Adobe Acrobat PDF files. To us the phrase “Let’s print a web page.” is like saying “Let’s fly a boat.” or “Let’s sail a bike.” Permit us to explain.

The Web is its own unique medium, just like TV or radio broadcasts are each unique. It is not print viewed on a CRT screen. The Web was conceived of and designed to be an on-line medium for conveying content, without overly specific format. To accomodate the wide variety of computers and monitor sizes, web pages are written in a special language and viewed with special software that allows them to be formatted right on the computer that views them. Consequently, the web lacks the margins and page breaks and rigid layout that make for elegant, word processor-style printouts.

We’re all familiar with word processing software which is designed to print words on paper. When typing, the paper size, margins, spacing, tabs, indents, page breaks, font, etc., are all determined by the typist. The reader sees the content in the specific format chosen to look good on the printed page.

Alright, so maybe you’re willing to put up with ugly printouts. Well, what about the cost? If you have bought any inkjet cartridges lately, you know how expensive printing is. Consider that since we’re always adding new material to the Guide, your printouts will soon be out of date. And once you’ve got your 1200 page stack of 65 chapters, we bet you’ll dearly miss having the ability to do a computer search and instantly find the topic you’re looking for.

What do we suggest? Support the original intent of the World Wide Web. Stop thinking of the Web as print on your screen. It is a completely separate medium that must be engaged and interacted with in an entirely different manner than print media. If you’re uncomfortable reading the Guide on the web, get a proper ergonomic computer desk and an adjustable chair. If you’re having trouble reading the Guide on your screen, increase the font size in your browser’s “preferences” settings, or simply get a bigger monitor. If you are tired of dialing in with a phone modem and waiting for web pages to download, get a high speed internet connection that’s always on-line. Then download the chapter onto your Palm Pilot and carry it around with you.

Just remember; the tree you save by not printing out the Guide might just be a rubber tree!

Having said all that, we realize that you’re probably going to ignore our advice and start printing. Since Guide users tell us that they typically want to print a section of a chapter (not the whole chapter), we decided to provide instructions on doing just that.

The methods offered below are considered the simplest way to print partial web page content. There are other methods (for example, if you have web page creation software like Adobe Pagemill or Microsoft Front Page, you can pull web content to your hard drive, edit and print it) but for general use, these are the recommended methods.

It is best to begin by using the Help or Information provided with your browser to find out how that browser and version best prints web pages. After you do that, try the following specifics which we have arranged from easiest to hardest. Since doing even difficult things on a Mac is still easier than doing easy things on Windows, we will, of course, start with Apple computers.

To print part of a chapter from an Apple Computer on any printer

  1. In Netscape Communicator, click this link for the Table of Contents and then click the link for the chapter that you want to print a selection from. Once it has loaded in the browser, hold the mouse button down until a menu appears. Choose Open This Page In Composer. Now select and delete the parts you don’t want and print what’s left.
  2. In Netscape Communicator, copy the URL (web address) of the chapter you want to print a selection from. From the File menu, choose Open Location In Composer, paste the URL into the window, then click OK. This will load the web page into Composer. Now select and delete the parts you don’t want and print what’s left.
  3. With Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, select Print Preview from the File menu. This will sequentially display the pages just as they would print out. Use it to determine the page numbers of the pages you’d like to print. Adjust the page breaks by clicking and dragging the text up or down. Print just the desired page numbers.
  4. Using Microsoft Word 98 (or a similar word processor with the capability to open web pages), select Open web page from the file menu. Type or Paste in the URL (web page address) of the chapter that you want to print from and click OK. This will load the web page into Word 98. You can now work with the chapter as a normal word processing document. Then either:
    • select and delete the parts you don’t want and print what’s left, or
    • select Print Preview from the file menu, and use it to determine the page numbers of the pages you’d like to print. Print just those pages.
  5. In your browser, select the text that you want to print, Copy it, and then Paste it into a blank word processor document. Print from your word processor. (This will not, however, provide you with the graphics.)
  6. With Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, select Print. Once the Print window is open, use whatever method your particular printer uses to make a Print Preview. This will sequentially display the pages just as they would print out. Use it to determine the page numbers of the pages you’d like to print. Print just those pages.

To print part of a chapter from an Apple Computer on a Postscript printer

(If you don’t know whether or not you have a Postscript printer, you probably don’t have one. Just use the instructions above which apply to all printers, Postscript or not.)

  1. Choose Print… from your browser. When the print dialogue box pops up, choose “Destination: File” and save a Postscript file containing a description of the entire chapter.Then using a version of Ghostscript, available from:http://www.kiffe.com/macghostview.htmlor

    http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/mac/

    view the document the way it will be printed to determine the page numbers of the pages that you want to print. Print just those pages.

To print certain parts of a chapter from Windows on any printer

  1. In Netscape Communicator 4.7, click this link for the Table of Contents and then click the link for the chapter that you want to print a selection from. Once it has loaded in the browser, choose Edit Page from the File menu to open the chapter in Netscape Composer. Select and delete any portions of the page you don’t want, and print the rest.
  2. In Netscape Communicator 4.7, click this link for the Table of Contents and then click the link for the chapter that you want to print a selection from. Once there, choose Print Preview from the “File” menu. This will sequentially display the pages just as they would print out. Flip through to determine the page numbers of the pages you’d like to print. Print just those pages.
  3. In Internet Explorer 5.0, click this link for the Table of Contents and then choose Save As > Web Page, Complete. The entire chapter complete with graphics will be saved to your hard drive. You can now open the “chapter_name.html” file with any word processor that is capable of reading HTML. The page will be displayed in your word processor with graphics, allowing you to make any changes you wish before printing. Delete the parts you don’t want and print what’s left.(When printing, do NOT check the “Print all linked documents” option. This would result in hundreds of pages when printing most pages from the BHQ site! If your printer offers a Print Preview option, you can visually check which pages you want to print, and set only those pages to print.)
  4. Using Microsoft Word 97 (or a similar word processor with the capability to open web pages), select Open from the file menu. Type or Paste in the URL (web page address) of the chapter that you want to print from and click Open. This will load the web page into Word 97. You can now work with the chapter as a normal word processing document. Then either:
    • delete the parts you don’t want and print what’s left, or
    • select Print Preview from the file menu, and use it to determine the page numbers of the pages you’d like to print. Print just those pages.
  5. In Internet Explorer 5.0, click this link for the Table of Contents and then click the link for the chapter that you want to print a selection from. Then from the File menu select Edit in Microsoft Word 97 for Windows option. This will bring the text of the page into a Word 97 document. Once there, simply edit as you would a Word 97 document, and print. (Note: As this method only brings the text of a page into Word 97, graphics will not be included.)
  6. In Internet Explorer 5.0, you can Select and Copy text from the web page and paste it directly into any word processor software. This will not capture graphics, however.(In Word 97 when selecting “New…” from the “File” menu, choose “Web Page > Blank” as the option. This way the formatting of the text will be preserved better than when simply choosing a blank Word 97 document.)

To print part of a chapter from Windows on a Postscript printer

(If you don’t know whether or not you have a Postscript printer, you probably don’t have one. Just use the instructions above which apply to all printers, Postscript or not.)

  1. Choose Print… from your browser. When the print dialogue box pops up, choose “Destination: File” and save a Postscript file containing a description of the entire chapter.Then using a version of Ghostscript, available from:http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/view the document the way it will be printed to determine the page numbers of the pages that you want to print. Print just those pages.

To print part of a chapter from non-Mac/Windows platforms on a Postscript printer

  1. Choose Print… from your browser. When the print dialogue box pops up, choose “Destination: File” and save a Postscript file containing a description of the entire chapter.Then using a version of Ghostscript, available from:http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/view the document the way it will be printed to determine the page numbers of the pages that you want to print. Print just those pages.

MB 6/15/95
MB 12/13/95
MB 6/22/98
MB 7/27/98
SKB 11/24/98
MB 1/8/99
MB and MK 7/17/00