I'm using a wiki document library on Share Point as a central repository for design and implementation documentation on a project that I am working on (The selection of the wiki as the documentation repository is the topic for another post). At some point in the future, I know I will be asked to provide a hard copy of my documentation, and I didn't have a really easy way to print the wiki.

My first thought, was that there must be a program out there, that lets you specify a set of URL's, and then it will go print them for you. Maybe I wasn't searching on the correct terms, but I couldn't find anything. I remembered there was a print linked documents function in IE, so I went back to investigate that.

The print links option, is in the options tab of the IE 7 print dialog box. If selected, it will print all 1st level linked documents of the page you are currently on. So, all you really need to do is create a .html file someplace on your computer, and add URL's to it, open in IE, and print it with the print linked documents option. You can create several different .html files each with a different set of URLs. I wish you could specify to print n levels deep, as that way you could build up a hierarchy of .html files. Perhaps this would be worthy of an IE plug-in?

Getting back to the Share Point wiki, I wanted a quick way to get the URLs for the pages I wanted to print. There are the default list views, which list all content in the wiki, which almost work, but there are too many extra hyper links. I decided to create a new view, that only contained the wiki page name (as a hyperlink to the document), as well as various non-linked text fields, like date created, modified and version. I could then copy this to a .html file and print.

So why not just print from that view? Well, there are all the other URLs on the page, such as the side bar, and admin menus, that would also get printed. However, if the pages you want to print are displayed in a grouping (and with the way I name and categorize my wiki pages, this is pretty easy), you can just highlight the rows, and choose the print selection option in the print dialog box (and print linked documents), and then you don't even have to maintain a list of .html files. This meets my needs for the foreseeable future.

I came up with the following list, which outlines what I'd like to see in a standalone application, or IE plug in.

• Site spider to gather URLs (with options to filter specific links using regex)
• Drag Drop URLs to organize them into logical groupings for printing
• Define lists which build form other lists
• More formatting options for printing
• Ability to add meta data to the pages referenced by the URL
• Print a table of all links found in the documents
• Actually this is an option already in IE, but I'd like to see it print a single list, instead of 1 per page, so there are no duplicate URLs. Then add a footnote to each link on the actual document which can be used to reference the table of links.