Knowledge base documents usually look terrible when printed, and waste tons of paper and ink. It adds up the printing cost and harm the environment. Therefore, PHPKB knowledge base software allows you to add a print button on your knowledge base documents (article, news) that generates a printer-friendly version of your document.
Why print version of document is required?
Knowledge sharing on digital platforms avail your team and users everything at the touch of a button. But print media still plays a huge role because of the following reasons.
- Convenient: One of the key advantages of printing out material is that it is convenient. If you need to mark it up or make notes on it, it is easy to do.
- Ease of Reading: For many users, printed documents remain easier to read. Digital versions are hard on the eyes, at least when read from tablets, phones, or conventional computers with low light and no glare screens. On the other hand, the printed document is easy to read in anything but dark conditions.
- Uniform Experience: Your employees and partners might access knowledge base from a plethora of different devices, with different operating systems, different browsers, each with different versions and plugins. This can mean user experiences with your knowledge base can be vastly different. However, printed document design is not affected by these factors and is same for majority of audience.
- Professional Assistance: Printed versions of knowledge base documents can be used as references in your meetings and presentations with your partners or clients.
How to print knowledge base documents in PHPKB?
You can easily enable the print button on your documents i.e. articles and news. Print buttons on news can be enabled by marking the "Print News" setting available under "News Page" settings of "Feature Settings"
To enable it for articles; Go to "Articles Setting" and scroll down to "Article Options" setting. Look for "Print Article?" setting and enable this. This would start displaying the print button in front end article screen as shown in the screenshot below:
Best Practices Followed by PHPKB to Produce Print-friendly Documents
PHPKB knowledge management software cleans and formats knowledge base documents for perfect print experience. This printable version functionality removes non-printable content from a document (such as images, sidebar navigation, buttons) for ease of printing. The screenshot below shows the print version of a knowledge base article.
- Black on White Color: For document's print version, PHPKB Knowledge base software sets the background white and font color black. This results in optimum print quality on black & white printers and reduces the consumption of ink or toner because of white background.
- Readable Font: PHPKB knowledge base tool doesn't use simple any stylistic font on print versions to make reading easier.
- Optimum Font Size: The font size in print version is higher than web interface to give users smooth reading experience.
- Removal of Non-essential Sections: PHPKB knowledge management tool removes the sections that doesn't contribute in print version such as feedback, comments, rating, related articles, etc.
- Removes Navigation: Navigation links can't be productive in print versions and by removing side-navigation, it allows the text more room to flow across the screen - making it easier to read when printed out.
- Removal of JavaScript: Print pages don't have any active functionality and unwanted CSS and JavaScript would just cost the page speed. Therefore, PHPKB knowledge management tool removes them from the print versions.
