Printing Tips

Unlike just any other website, most of the content of this website are worth printing and carrying to temples, prayers etc. Keeping this in mind, the design of the website has also been optimised for

• Printing hardcopies of the content
• Making archival documents for future reference

with little of no extra effort in the most economical method possible.

This page gives brief outlines on how to maximize the  print quality with minimal effort.

To get the best output on paper, apart from a good printer make sure that all the necessary fonts are installed on your computer. Besides you will also need some modern browser like Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or newer, although browsers like Internet Explorer 6, Opera 8 or newer will also suffice.

Using these browsers you can make high quality hard copies of content published on this website.

To make a fine hardcopy of the content, just print the document through any of the many modern browsers (browser versions released post 2003). You should get a well formatted document printout from your printer.

Archival Copy

Although Flowers of Devotion is here to stay, one may want to make archival copies for offline use. This can be accomplished by either saving the page and its resources, or better still making a PDF document of the page’ contents.  You can use the PDF to circulate content to your family, friends, relatives and all alike.

PDF is a popular and a very reliable document format for archiving documents and is platform independent. In other words no matter what the platform (Intel, PPC, SPARC etc.), no matter what the Operating System (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac etc.), no matter what the screen resolution, the document will print the same. This makes it an ideal document archiving formal for future reference.

The following paragraphs will outline the process of making high quality PDFs.

PDFs can be created using virtually any application as long as some sort of PDF Distilling software is installed in the computer. There are commercial products including Adobe’s Acrobat and a few other software. However you can make PDFs using PdfCreator, a free (Open-Source) software, which for the most part produces high quality PDFs. Some options present in Acrobat are not available though, but this will not affect much.

First make sure that you have all the necessary fonts installed. Then download PDFcreator, a free PDF distiller. Installation requires Administrative previlages and is rather straight forward and self-explanatory.

Post installation, the system requires a restart (reboot) and after a restart (rebooting the machine), you will see PDF creator installed as a Windows Printer. From your browser you can print PDF copies of pages using PDFcreator and make offline archive of the same.

Users of Linux or similar Unix-like Operating systems can print postscript and use ps2pdf command.

Download a sample file to have an idea of how content will render and print through PDFCreator.

Users will also require the free Adobe reader to optimally read and print documents. Other alternatives though good, may rot correctly render certain types of content, notably Sanskrit and other Indian vernacular languages.