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Printing 'recipe' images only in posts

  1. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Hi,

    I was wondering if there way any way I could install/download a button to have a printer friendly version of my recipes on my blog (http://thepatternedplate.wordpress.com/).

    Typically, its a jpg image that i upload at the end of each post and have only recently noticed, after changing my theme, that the image is very small on my printer preview. I obviously don't want to frustrate those who read my posts and want to print out the recipe only..... Anything that can be done? Am open to alternative suggestions to what I am doing currently.

    Much thanks in advance...

    The blog I need help with is thepatternedplate.wordpress.com.

  2. timethief
    Member

    Have you noticed the sharing buttons do include an button for "print this posts" and for "email this post"?

  3. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Yes I do have that on right now. But what I was looking for was way of having a printer friendly way of printing out only the recipe, not the entire post.

    This page is a typical example -

    http://thepatternedplate.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/magic-in-the-middle-cookies/

    The last image is a recipe. It would be great, if viewers were given the option to print out only that image.

    If its possible, great! If not, I'll live with it, or probably will have to post the recipe one the post content itself.

  4. timethief
    Member

    I just did that. It's an image like any other image so I clicked the image. It displayed on it's own page. http://thepatternedplate.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/magic-in-the-middle.jpg?w=507 Then I right clicked the image and chose "save image as". It's now on my desktop.

  5. 1tess
    Moderator

    You would be better off to use PrintFriendly or to upload a pdf copy of the recipe text as a Scribd embed.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/scribd/
    http://www.printfriendly.com/

  6. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Yeah I know it can be done that way but that's the issue though timethief, people are not always clued on, for one, and second, its a faff. A single click, and the file being print sized and ready to go is better. I appreciate that when i go onto other blogs. Thanks for your input.

    1tess I did check out printfriendly and I have the sharing button ready to go. Just wondered if there was an alternative. I will have a look at Scribd right now. Thanks :-)

  7. 1tess
    Moderator

    PrintFriendly will require your readers to make choices rather than just print a recipe.
    Scribed should work, but that means you have to make a pdf.

    My own point of view is that if I want to find a recipe, then I'll either look though cookbooks I own and love or I'll search online.

    We moved to a new how almost a year ago and my massive binders of recipes are only gathering dust: Some of them are organized, some not. It's just too much trouble to search through the printouts to be enjoyable for me.

    There is one binder or recipes I actually cooked from years ago, recipes from magazines, newspapers, or written by hand by my mother or mother-in-law that are nice to look through…

    Bookmarks online, they are easy to organize. And they are easily searchable.

    But that is only my opinion…

  8. 1tess
    Moderator

    new how = new house (typo prone tessie…)

  9. timethief
    Member

    PrintFriendly will require your readers to make choices rather than just print a recipe. Scribed should work, but that means you have to make a pdf.

    I honestly think all of that will be a turn-off to visitors. Surely everyone visiting the site must know computer basics and all this amounts to is saving an image to one's own computer. Even if you had to post a ext widget with instructions they would be very short and to the point. Scroll to the bottom of any post and click the recipe box image. When the page opens right click and save it to your desktop. IMHO that's going to be better received than your having having to make a PDF for every one of them. It's just an image after all.

  10. 1tess
    Moderator

    The problem with recipes as images is that search engines don't read the text in them.

    If I were making images with the recipes available on my site, then the simplest way to allow readers to print plain unadorned text (and search engines to read) would be to make a page 2 where you copy/paste the text from the illustration program used to make the recipe image.
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/nextpage/

    Making a pdf on a mac is only a keystroke: just choosing "save as pdf" and voila. I don't know about how difficult it is on other operating systems…

  11. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Wow! You guys are great!

    Timethief, the entire reason I have posted is because some of my readers have asked me about this option, so its only right that I look into it and see what all the relevant choices are. Another friend of mine who has a blog has come up with the exact same issue. She had several posters ask about her recipe prints (she was also doing it as an image), so perhaps some people are still not as clued up.

    1tess, you have a very valid point about the search engines. And I really like your idea with the extra page. Ummm, I have to admit, I did not know about the extra page...sheesh...see timethief, I myself, am not clued up!!!!

    So I will try all your suggestions and go for what I feel works best.

    Thanks very much 1tess, I really appreciate your input.

  12. 1tess
    Moderator

    you are welcome

  13. justjennifer
    Member

    There is a cooking site here on WordPress.com, although it is not in English, that uses CSS in order to create selective text for print. Of course it requires the Custom Design upgrade and knowledge of CSS to do this, but it is a possibility.

  14. thepatternedplate
    Member

    I do have the CSS upgrade Jennifer...but am not clued up on how to sort it out myself.....anyone can help?

  15. justjennifer
    Member

    I'm not really versed enough in CSS enough to say, but I'll mark this thread for some help.

  16. thesacredpath
    Member

    @jennifer, can you give us a link to that site so I can take a look? Thinking on this I'm not bringing to mind a way to do it. If I have an example then I can figure it out.

  17. justjennifer
    Member

    Thanks, tsp!

    http://bissim.com/ She even has a note in the sidebar that says "How do you print a recipe here?! Easy enough. Just click on the desired post title and then print. The only thing that will be printed is the recipe!"

  18. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Here's her english site, if you want to make it easier on yourself! She has the same function on the english site too.

    http://www.mybissim.com/

    Now if I could so the same, that would be the bees knees!

  19. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Bump...any ideas taken from the bissim website? Thanks :-)

  20. thesacredpath
    Member

    @justjennifer, all there is in the CSS is this:

    div.noprint {
display: none !important;
}

    and then the wrap what they don't want to print in a div like this:

    <div class="noprint">
The stuff they do not want to print here
</div>

    That is all I see and I'm a little confused as to why it works. From looking at it, I would thing anything within that div would be hidden from view on the web page.

  21. justjennifer
    Member

    Got me, tsp. I'm CSS challenged. :)

  22. thesacredpath
    Member

    Normally, what you do is to include a print.css file and declare it in the head of a webpage and then you can define such things as noprint or print there and then you can call those classes or IDs within the body or within posts and pages.

  23. thepatternedplate
    Member

    Ok, thesacredpath, so what to do now? Possibility or not?

    I mean I have resolved the issue in that I have uploaded a pdf file and linked it so that it opens at the proper size in a separate window. It does mean saving and uploading another image, but it does the job as I wanted it.

    Would be interesting to know how this blogger got it to work.

  24. thepatternedplate
    Member

    I sound ungrateful, I'm sorry, am not!!!

    Thankyou, though, for looking into it and for all the other ideas :-))

  25. justjennifer
    Member

    @thepatternedplate-Try out the CSS on a test post (after adding the bit in the stylesheet, of course)? Worst that could happen is that it won't work.

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