print a calendar from a website

JPCIRIG

New Member
Hello, I'm an end user and not a programmer, so I apologize if my terminology is off. I am a business owner and have hired a web design firm to build our website, however, we have reached a design impasse on a feature which would be very important to me - so I'm reaching out to the world wide web for help.

in a nutshell, we are bar with a live music venue on a tropical island. We have bands nightly and the schedule is a calendar is on our website.

My initial request for the website was: a calendar on the page with the bands appearing on the appropriate day. Web calendar to sync with my ical (they have told me that they can only sync with a google cal - which i will then have to sync that with my ical...sounds fishy). Now here's the key feature i need, I want the customers to be able to print out the cal and have the print out be a finished, polished product. This is important, because as I mentioned earlier, we are in a heavy tourist destination, so this calendar of events will be printed by villa rental owners, hotels, info booths, etc. So, it is critical that the page that comes out of the printer is a finished product with our logo, info, etc. It's going to be posted on bulletin boards and such. Our designer says that we can only print it out in list format which is obviously not going to work because if we have 30 nights of music, it will be 10 pages long.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear, so please ask. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks - Joe
 

JPCIRIG

New Member
Thank you!! This is exactly what I was hoping for! The article you've mentioned, albeit a bit technical for this lay-person, seems to describe printing out of an entire web page. My goal is to print out a specific calendar of events for a specific time period (probably two weeks). Would the method described include that functionality?
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
I can't vouch for syncing with iCal, but unless it's online with some kind of API (an interface that allows developers to pull information via the internet), you really wouldn't be able to do that automatically. I do know that Google Calendar can import iCal-formatted calendar info, though, and a quick search shows that you can sync iCal with Google Calendar. Outputting a printable page with the calendar information on it is pretty straight-forward. I've worked with the GCal API before. It's pretty easy.

Could you post a link to the site? It kinda sounds like you've hired one of those knuckleheads who just slaps a template they downloaded onto a server and acts like they've built something special. If that's the case, you may do better to cut your losses and hire someone with half a brain.
 

JPCIRIG

New Member
It's very surprising. We tried to do it right and went with what we thought were the top of the line. They do many major brands/companies. Maybe our little venue is too small!

Either way, I'd prefer not to post the link to the dev site, however, I'd be happy to PM or email it over to you to have a look.
 

JPCIRIG

New Member
In a nutshell, the website has a calendar of events which actually looks like a calendar. Any date which has an event is highlighted and hovering over that event displays the details. My goal is to have a "print schedule of events" option in which a list is printed out on, for lack of a better term, our letterhead - or a standard background with our logo and a footer containing our info. For example, Our logo at the top beneath which appears two columns of listed events like (line 1) "Dec 1 - The Beatles, (line 2) Dec 2 - U2, (line 3) Dec 3 - The Rolling Stones", etc. Since we book band two weeks in advance, it would only list two weeks of events (two columns of 7 lines each).
The print out has to look nice and polished, preferably in our font to match our look and feel.

may not be doable - but it's a nice concept!
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
The print out has to look nice and polished, preferably in our font to match our look and feel.

Creating a PDF with embedded fonts and images and uploading it is the best way of controling fonts, because unless the viewer has that exact font installed it will not print correctly.
 

JPCIRIG

New Member
Ok. Once I do that, is there a way to print the two columns of events as described above?

Thanks again for the help, guys.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
You're going to have to get someone to build this all out for you.

If you want to PM me the link, you can. If they're a high-end joint, they may be full of it, or if your budget was low, they may just be not giving it their all.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Unless they use @font-face...

In some browsers @font-face is fallible when it comes to printing. Added to that is background images are not printed by default, so for precise print rendering control, which is what the TS apparently requires, a PDF is what I would suggest to anyone.
 
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