Images and Printing

Images
Images can be saved in many different formats and can be viewed differently depending on these formats.

Image Scaling
Images can be scaled by changing the image measurement units. These units can be different types such as;
 * Pixels: px
 * Dots per inch: dpi

These are the most commonly used measurement types for images over the web. Images can be scaled in HTML using tags or attributes called width and height. An example of this is when an image may be 200px in width and 300px in height, now I put this inside a box on a web page. I may have less space to work with so i change the width and height of the box to say 100px and 150px. The image size is the same but because i have specifically set the width and height of the box, it will crunch the image to fit this box.

Browsers such as older versions of internet explorer will do this crunch automatically but will also crunch any other content that may be with the image. This can lead to distorted content and images. There are ways around this, the main solution is not to crunch images to a size but to resize the image before putting it in.

Printing
When printing a page from the internet, it will try and crunch the image to fit on the page and thus crunching the content. The reason for this is that a printer doesn't understand HTML so it will ignore any width or height the user has set manually and thus our image may be back to full size and mess up our print. This will distort and ruin images during printing.

There are different methods for handling web printing;
 * Print Screen :- print what the user sees, this may crunch or stretch the data depending on web page and printer page size
 * Copy and Paste to Microsoft Word :- this will allow word to interpret the web page and try and make it appear correctly but this can be messy due to words default formatting
 * Merge Template :- Business Express has this functionality and this is the one we recommend you use.
 * Email to Self :- Emailing the HTML can be a good idea if the page is less than 600px wide as programs such as outlook can read HTML
 * Pre-Printed :- Organise headed paper with the images already printed in high quality that way on the text needs to positioned.

Mail Merge Template - Recommended Solution
This feature is offered in Business Express. What it does is take data from the database and produce a template pulling in the fields that the user requests. This allows for the dynamic creation of mails regardless of the number of mails that need to be produced.