Updates to BCStudies program page, and PDF generation research
Did some updates to the conference program page, and then addressed the issue of printing more fully than I've done so far. There is a good print stylesheet, but users aren't often aware of how these work, and they also don't usually know how to configure their browsers to print Web pages properly (mostly, this involves setting the background colours/graphics to on or off, and removing the pointless headers and footers that browsers annoyingly add by default). I added some instructions for users right on the page, hidden and shown via a link, and made sure these instructions don't show up when printing. Then I started looking around for a more sophisticated alternative in the form of a PDF generator class for PHP. There are several, but it looks as though TCPDF is the best standalone (i.e. not requiring any extra code or PDF modules to be installed). It's not simple by any means, but it looks as though it would do the job. The key problem is that you need to build the page directly through instructions (which would involve parsing the XHTML source as XML) or pass it XHTML code in which all the styles are inline (which would mean transforming the source XHTML + stylesheet to integrate all the styles inline). This would be a lot of work, I think, and for this particular site it's probably not worth it, given that the browser printout is pretty good. It might be useful in future, though.