Travel Notes: Checking It Twice

It's great to have a good packing list, but it's important to check the list. You've got to write things down, but sometimes you also need to read them again.

Of course, we could instantly print the packing list. But that list is formatted for the screen; if we start printing it, we'll be tempted to make it look better on the page.

If we want it to look good on the page, a nice approach turns out to be HTML Export. That's right -- we export the packing list to HTML, even though we have no intention of putting it one the Web. HTML is a good text format, and CSS stylesheets give us good control over how out lists look on the page. Set up some simple templates, press preview, and here's what we get in Safari.

I confess I got a little carried away here, and wasted about 45 minutes tinkering with styles to get it just right. A little extra space between categories, a nice header, flexible scaling in case I need a wallet-size version of the checklist. Your mileage will vary (and you can probably make it look good in much less time.

Nice side effects:

• The list is a standard HTML microformat, so you can import it into all sorts of programs
• You should have no trouble, for example, getting your list on your PDA, or emailing it
• Your Tinderbox note isn't mixed up with print formatting