Plants of Southern California: Trail Guides: Printing Instructions

Introduction and Explanation of Trail Guides

The Plant Trail Guides are online in three versions:

• the complete webpage, including Trail Guide and additional information (html format);
• The Trail Guide alone (html format); and
• The Trail Guide alone in booklet form (pdf format).

Each of these is described in detail below, with printing instructions as necessary.

The complete webpage

The complete webpage contains the Introduction, Highlights of This Trail, Fieldwork Dates, The Plant Guide, and Summary of List Changes With Time, and Comments On Specific Species.

This is the only version directly linked from other references on my site. Printing this page will give all this other information about a trail and the guide, as well as the version of the guide with table lines around each entry in the guide itself, and preserve the color information displayed in your browser.

This version can be printed at any size desired by the reader, using the browser's capabilities to change the printed size. For example, in Firefox, in the Scale drop-down menu, you can make the size any given percentage, such as 50% (smaller by a factor of two) or 200% (larger by a factor of two).

The trail guide alone (html)

This is called a version for printing, without lines and other text: html, and is linked immediately under the header for The Plant Guide itself on the full webpage.

This is an html version of just The Plant Guide itself, without the Introduction et al. The lines around each entry in the guide itself are removed, making for a more compact printout. Color information is removed except for any links. (The color information, and underlining, depending on how you set up your browser, is retained to let you know that there was a note about that species in the full Guide. If you wish, you can set your printer properties to default to replacing all colors with black.)

This version can also be printed at any size desired by the reader, using the browser's capabilities to change the printed size. See also Tips For Printing the Trail Guides for advanced tips on how to adjust the printout to your specifications.

The Trail Guide alone in booklet form

This is called a version for printing, without lines and other text: pdf Clickbook booklet, and is also linked immediately under the header for The Plant Guide itself on the full webpage.

This gives an Adobe Acrobat version of just The Plant Guide itself, without the Introduction et al. This has the advantage that it can be printed to make a double-sided booklet, with the pages reduced so that two pages fit on a normal single sheet of paper. In this way, four pages fit on both sides of a normal single sheet of paper, and the printout can be folded to produce a compact booklet.

The spacing of the entries in the Guide has generally been altered so that the number of pages is a multiple of four. This stretches the printout to use all available space, leaving more room for notes for individual species.

If you wish to make a booklet, there is no user control over the print size, since changing the print size will destroy the relationship of the back side to the front side.

The only tricky part is that one has to make sure to print the even-numbered pages on the back of the odd-numbered pages in the correct orientation. Two examples:

• When printing to a full-duplex printer such as the Brother MFC 8840D, you have to specify to use the duplexing, and then to flip on top edge to produce the booklet correctly (which reverses the printout).

• When printing to a non-duplexing printer, like a typical inkjet such as the HP Deskjet 712C, check first to see if your printer supports double-sided printing (for the Deskjet 712C, double-sided printing is supported in Windows 9x, but not in Windows XP). If it does, the printer driver may automatically print the odd-numbered pages first, and then give you detailed instructions for how to put the paper back in to print the even-numbered pages.

  If your printer does not support automatic double-sided printing, first print the odd pages. (In the Adobe Acrobat print screen, click on subset to get the option to print only odd or even pages.) Then take the printed pages and put them back into the printer to be printed on the other side, and then print the even pages on the back of the already-printed odd pages.

  To do this correctly, you need to know exactly how to put your pages back into the printer in the correct orientation - i.e.:

  • printed side up or down;
  • pages in the order they came out of the printer or pages shuffled to be in the reverse order they came out of the printer; and
  • pages back in the same way they came out or rotated 180°.

  It may also be necessary to set an option to reverse pages in your printer options.

  Trial and error is the only way to get this correct. Once you figure out how to do it, write it down so you don't have to figure it out again!

Also, note that the text in the printed guide will be darker and more readable if you use an inkjet printer, than if you use a laser printer, due to the smaller size of the font when the page is reduced to booklet size.

I just began providing pdf versions on 4/3/06 when I upgraded to Clickbook v.9, so it will be a while before pdf versions are available for all plant trail guides.

Examples for the three options

Consider the Plant Guide to Coyote Trail / N. Trans Preserve Trail / Ranch Road / Oak Tree Trail Loop, Santa Rosa Plateau, using the default print versions in Firefox 1.5:

• Printing the full Guide requires 16 pages, which would normally be on one side of 16 sheets of paper (all numbers are for the Guide as of 4/3/06, and may change if the Guide gets longer in the future). You could also print this double-sided on 8 sheets of paper.

• Printing the html Print Version requires 10 pages, which would normally be on one side of 10 sheets of paper, or could go on both sides of 5 sheets of paper.

• Printing the pdf Print Version requires 12 pages (stretched from 10 pages to use available printing space), but only 3 sheets of paper if you do it correctly. If you blindly print this out, it will take 6 sheets of paper, and you would not be able to make a booklet out of it. If you print it out as instructed above, it will require just 3 sheets of paper, and will make a neat little booklet after you fold the pages in half. You can use the folded booklet as is, with loose sheets of paper, or you can use a regular stapler to staple it near the top and bottom roughly along the fold, or a long-reach stapler to do a better job and staple it perfectly along the fold wherever you'd like.

Go to Plants of Southern California: Trail Guides

Copyright © 2006 by Tom Chester
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://tchester.org/plants/lists/guides_printing.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 4 April 2006