program to print booklet from website

dvdfan

Heres what i need to do in simple terms. I have an access database containing hundreds of movies and details such as title, date, plot, actors etc. I need to compact say 30-40 of each movie from about 8 different genre's (new release, horror, comedy etc) into a small catalogue.

This information is displayed on my website through asp interacting with the access database and displaying it in a table format. But i want to display say for example 5 pages of new releases, 3 pages of horror, 3 pages of comedy etc

Now the problem is i want each new genre to start on a new page when printing, so how can i tell this when viewing the webpage and how can i tell the asp code how many movies to display for each genre when i dont know how many will fit on a page because they vary in size.

Each movie is set to diplay a max amount of charachters about the plot eg 250 characters but some movies only have a 100 so it would vary how many movies would fit on a page.

Also ideally i would also like to have a index and page number printed. Maybe im looking for too much to be able to do this all automatically or does anyone know of such a program prefebely not too expensive that could do this. Alternatively i could just copy and paste the text into a word doc and print the catalogue but the website updates regularly and so it would be a pain constantly re-pasting the new movies to reprint new catalogues.

Any suggestions or idea's, this would be a 56 page booklet that would need to be printed double sided so it could be abit complicated. If you need any further info just shout.

Cheers

Seth Brundle

You could get the data and using something like ASP create a word document and insert page breaks before each different section.

rsynnott

Or, ideally, a PDF. No doubt there are free tools to do this in ASP.

amen

as for the text just have a staic area taking a max of 250 chars padding notes that are less then each page has the same layout much easier to write the code this way
I'm sure that there are some Access ->PDf engines out there

Did you write the site yourself or get someone to do it? Could they do the booklet for you

if you need more help let me know.

dvdfan

Thanksfor the replies guys,

Ill post some links to show you exactly what i mean

Here is an example of my catalogue
Catalogue

I get the information from asp pages like these
Comedy
Crime

Then i paste the information into word but the 2 pages above are updated regularly so when its updated i have to go copying and pasting all the info again. I was hoping i could just set up an asp page that prints all the information on one web page and then i could just print it through my program that akes it into a booklet form.

What do you think guys. Also why do you suggest using pdf instead of word. What are te benefits considering i will be the only one using the file for printing???

btw, i do the programming so if theres anything i can do just suggest

Seth Brundle

if you do all the coding then you decide which format to choose - google for tutorials on 'asp to pdf' or 'asp to word'.

Why do a number of links tell me that I have timed out?

on a different matter maybe read this...
www.unixwiz.net/techtips/sql-injection.html

dvdfan

fixed the timing out problem, i had the pages password protected. Ill have a look into asp to pdf and see ow i get on

Thanks

clearz

There is a CSS page-break for web pages but I have never used it so I dont know how good it is.
Also if you are gonna dynamically create a document other than a web page I would go with one of the newer XML based formats like OpenDocument intead of a PDF or word file.