Note on printing in general and the Freediving pathfinder in particular

The pathfinder is supposed to be printed on a single page, front and back, and then preferably laminated to stand up to any serious use. From the browser and computer I composed it on (Netscape 4.5 on a PowerMac G3), it does indeed print on two pages. But when I switched to other random computers on campus, each would display the page differently and also print it differently. Some setups wanted to print the same document over 4 pages, rather than only 2. The fact that browsers all display differently is pretty common knowledge, but that they all print differently too is something new to me.

The lesson here is that, if a document MUST be formatted in a certain way, don't do it in HTML. (For better or worse, PDF is probably your best bet.) And if you do compose a document in HTML, it should be flexible and be allowed to render differently under different circumstances. Indeed, this is the beauty of HTML -- the text wraps to fit the user's own browser and platform settings, whatever they may be. The best way to achieve this versatility is by writing your pages strictly according to the HTML 4.0 specifications published by the World Wide Web Consortium.