Sent by Jukka K. Korpela on 29 September 2003 21:09
On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Don A. Elbourne Jr. wrote:
> A print style sheet makes the ubiquitous "Click Here for a Printer Friendly
> Version" link unnecessary, or does it?
I don't think those click here's were ubiquitous, and many of them were
not printer friendly, e.g. because they were designed for some particular
paper size. But surely we should at least try to make print copies good
using CSS rather than tailoring separate versions. The main limitation in
currently supported CSS is in page breaks, specifically in lack of good
tools for preventing them at unsuitable places. But separate versions
aren't much better.
There are several aspects to be considered, especially for pages with
heavy navigational repertoire or lots of eye candy images, which should
normally be omitted from printed copies. Columnar layout is
problematic, since sometimes it could and should be preserved on paper,
sometimes not. But even if we consider very simple pages, with no special
layout, there are several reasons why we should have some rules for print
media as separate from screen media. They need not be in a separate style
sheet; they could be in a page's normal style sheet in a @media print
part. And they would include
- usually setting colors to black and white (otherwise many people
will get text in grey)
- suppressing the printing of background images (just in case someone
has settings that would print them)
- removing underlines from links (and abbr and acronym elements)
- omitting forms
- setting font to some serif font, though this is debatable
- reducing font size and bolding of headings (unless already done for all
media).
Most of that is rather simple. But there might be some "screen-only"
content that should be omitted from print copies, and that usually
requires a little extra markup to give it a class.
Naturally, pages should be checked to see that they print decently in
Print Preview so that all the content fits. It's a typical, and serious,
problem that part of the content on the right is chopped off, since the
page is designed for some particular width, or some minimal width. Usually
the best approach is to fix that design, but if that's excluded, maybe
something could be done for the print media specifically
> People have grown accustom to mangled results when they use their browser's
> print feature. Unless they are presented a "printer friendly version" on
> screen, they may be reluctant to print the page at all.
I don't think that's a good argument. Actually I'm accustomed to seeing
such links that do not lead to particularly print-friendly versions.
But if this is really relevant, just include such a link that points to
the page itself. :-)
> So, some on the team are suggesting
> that we really DO need a "Click here for a printer friendly version" link
> that will give them a page on-screen, similar to what will be printed.
It will be hilarious if users actually print the page _their_ way, using
the Print button, and see that "Click here..." in the printed copy.
A practical point to consider: How important printability is, for a
particular page? People probably don't want to print a site's main page,
or image-rich pages. People often want to print pages containing contact
information, or essential instructions, or tabular information, or long
texts. Thus, the printing problems are most relevant for pages where they
can be dealt with rather easily, unless the overall page design is
complex.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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