Printing capability different when viewing in Collections or My Stories

[Anonymous User]

I was showing off my story map to a colleague from Collections and went to try and show the printing capability. But I was not able to print. I found that you are unable to print story maps when view through Collections. But if you pull up the story map through My Stories you're able to print. Will the printing capability be there in Collections when out of beta?

[OwenGeo]

Bryan -- Are you thinking that you'd want to print an individual story that's in a collection or are you looking to print all the stories/items in the collection (that is, the entire collection)?

[Anonymous User]

I think printing off single story maps would be fine for now. When we publish these we are pointing our stakeholders to the overview page for that collection. Since that is where we're pointing them if the user wanted to print-to-PDF that one story map they won't be able to. Trying to print the entire collection might be reasonable given the size and number of story maps in that collection.

Just a little background on why this is important. We produce various reports throughout the year and we are moving in a digital direction. Our program partners with 24 states in the northern region of the US. Back in December I showcased the new StoryMaps builder to these states at our regional meeting. The biggest concern they had with the new story maps was their users in small, rural areas with either slow or no internet capability. Previously they would have access to hard paged reports. The other concern was the ability to archive these story maps.

The ability to print was a huge step in the right direction and put our partners at ease. With the printing capability our partners are able to print or save them to send to users.

[OwenGeo]

Bryan -- OK, got it. Thanks as always for the detailed feedback. Would having an easy way to open a collection item in a new tab help address this need?

Not sure if you need a workaround in the meantime, but here's something to consider. Are the stories you are sharing changing frequently? If not, you could save them each to a PDF using the print feature after you publish them. Then upload the PDFs as items to ArcGIS, make them public (this would only be an option if you could share these publicly), and then put a download link to the PDF of each story in each story so your partners can download the PDFs as needed.

[Anonymous User]

New tab would be fine, just as long as they can print the story map I'm good for now. The most ideal method would be down the road just being able to print right from the collection but that isn't immediate.

I misspoke in my response. I stated, "Trying to print the entire collection might be reasonable given the size and number of story maps in that collection". What I meant to say was, "Trying to print the entire collection might NOT be reasonable given the size and number of story maps in that collection".

I will keep the workaround in my back pocket for now. The printing from collections has not come up yet but I noticed it so I'm trying to get ahead of the game. Thanks as always Owen!