Plants of Southern California: Trail Guides: Printing Instructions

Introduction and Explanation of Trail Guides

The Plant Trail Guides are online in three versions:

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:

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:


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