Printing your touring plans and formatting questions
 

A while ago, I added a tour planning page to my website (to create a tour you need to log into the site, otherwise all you see are "public" plans). While the planning system isn't used very much, I have been adding features to this page to make it more useful for bike tourists. Note that none of the these new features are available as I haven't finished creating and integrating all of them yet.

One capability I will be adding is the ability to print the planning information onto paper so that people can take their planning information with them on tour.

My question involves what to do with internet links on the page. In the plans that I've made, I have lots of weblinks. My assumption has been that if I wanted to use one of these links then I would have internet access and could access them directly from the planning page on my website. Without web access, a link is useless.

If I am going to create a specialized printable page should I include the entire URL for weblinks or simply leave them out? Note that some links, especially routes created on google maps can be huge.

For those of you who print your touring planning information on paper, do you print out the URLs, too?

use URL shortener, like goo.gl. then it's much easier to enter it by hand.

I'm not sure that solves my problem. It isn't clear to me that these URL shortening sites are accessible from a server-side program. It looks like they require you to actually type in the name and then submit a webpage. While this is simple enough from a keyboard, I'm not sure it will work (or is acceptable use given the licenses) in this case.

not sure, but I think the evil google will do what you want

First i think unterhausen is right and google api shall work for you. Here is an example how to do it. In case google doesn't like you or you don't like google you can install on the server your own url shortener, like YOURLS.

But if i were you i wouldn't make it too complex and let users put in and print out whatever they want. If it's a long and unreadable google map url then let it be so. Anyone can get a short URL with just one/two clicks and paste it into the page if they need it. This would be my approach.