Another challenge for DELTAGS | non-Xy "Can't Print 'ems"

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Carl,

Some of this will wander off-topic, but I'm trying to learn something
here. I think I may have come across another page that is resistant
to full or proper processing by DELTAGS. Try saving this and
converting it:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/837882.asp?0cv=CB20&cp1=1

Ah, the wonders of Frontpage. You will be left with assorted junk --
not all of it code, I admit -- that is left over.

I had wanted to provide this piece to few people. A couple of
curiosities really worked against it though. First, they've made it
annoyingly hard to read without horizontal scrolling . . . so I
decided not to forward it to these people via email. I know how to
shrink the font in the Netscape browser, but they may not in theirs.
(Of course, shrinking it leads to up-close squinting, even on my 21"
monitor.)  But shrinking the font only affects the local display. I
tried printing this out -- shrunk, unshrunk -- it makes no
difference. Even in landscape, the text after the first page runs
well out past the right margin. I would think this a deliberate step
to stymie printing, except that at a rudimentary HTML demo I attended,
the instructor, referring to the poor design of bad web pages, said
"Never automatically ascribe to malice what can be accounted for by
ignorance or stupidity."

Anyway, I have an aversion to roadblocks. There are ways to make
pages "unprintable," I'm told -- even at the server level, where you
can't readily get at them. I didn't try printing this with Mozilla
yet, which may have some other wrinkles, but in my experience there
are still some general printing problems with that. There are
probably some Win utilities that can get around these things. Right
now, the only way I can see to grab and print a page like this -- as
you see it onscreen in your browser -- is via successive screen
captures. They can't stop you from doing that, and I've done it in
cases where it was important enough. That leaves you with a .JPG
file, where the text is going to print out as a graphic, meaning it
will be kind of funky looking, though hopefully still readable.

If you ever run into this situation yourselves, what's your workaround
? Grab the page (if you can), and re-code the base HTML ?

Jordan