Thursday, July 21, 2011

TechNet "Build and Print a Book" beta now live

Is this thing on? - TechNet Print-a-Book Beta Available

"This week, a feature known as Print/Export a Collection (a.k.a. Print-a-Book) went live in our TechNet Library Lightweight as Beta service. This new feature offers improved printing features for TechNet articles and the ability to export one or more topics to PDF format.

To check out this feature, go to the TechNet Lightweight Library and click on the printer icon in the upper right-hand corner." [GD: Post leached in full]

This looks like a pretty darn cool feature. You turn it on, then browse the TechNet Library adding topics to your collection and then you organize and print/save as PDF that collection.

Here's some snaps of it in action.

(Note: Probably due to its newness and beta status as I write this I can't get it to actually "generate" a PDF or XHTML... I'm getting a "Unable to Service Request" page and/or "The current collection has become corrupt..." Alert dialog. I'll try again in a while)

First turn it on:

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Read the instructions and then start building your collection;

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Browse TechNet adding topics to your Collection;

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Manage/Organize your Collection and then generate it...

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This looks like an awesome way to build custom, offline doc's. Now if only I could send it to my Kindle... :)

3 comments:

HarveyK said...

Great addition.

We took a slightly different approach where people can just select things from a TOC and PDF or print.

http://support.geminiplatform.com/docs

Jeff Braaten said...

Instructions for sending a PDF to your Kindle are at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200375630

Greg said...

@Jeff Braaten
Oh I know how to put a PDF on my Kindle (I've got everyone I've blogged about in the past on there) but I'd rather not have to play the USB game and send it directly via whispernet. Also PDF's mostly byte on the Kindle 3. I'd rather a well formatted mobi version... But still, as is, it's pretty cool. And push comes to shove, you're right, the PDF can me copied over...

In any case, thanks for tip