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Printer Friendly Version

Sent by Julian on 29 September 2003 16:04


Yes, they are useful for as Kim stated, it prevents the need to create print copies of each page.
All you need to ensure is that each page <link>s to the print style sheet. The use of print
stylesheets makes the printer versions of the pages unnecessary.

There is no real conventional wisdom on this because for the most part, the big name sites do not
use styles much outside of font size, color, font-family, etc. A List Apart did have a link to an
explanation of what their print style sheet does but they did not show a print-styled page on
screen.

Having a print stylesheet will be beneficial to your visitors/users. However, if they are used to
seeing a "Print Version" link, you might wish to put that link up but rather than producing a print
version of the page, point the link to a page that describes the purpose of the print stylesheet. If
you wish to go to the trouble of creating a styleswitcher, you could use that in place of an
explanation - this has the benefit of showing the visitor what the page will look like before they
print it. Other than the additional coding to produce the print-preview of the page (ie
style-switching), this method would work quite well.

HTH,

Jules

Original Message -----------------------
My question to the CSS-D community:
Are print style sheets useful?
Are printer friendly versions necessary or redundant?
What is the conventional wisdom on this issue?
Do any "big name" sites use printer style sheets effectively?

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