11 On fonts and units

I have 730 fonts installed on my Winbox, none of which are Helvetica. I think Egor’s argument should read “Surveys of professional web designers on Macs…” I printed one of the ALA articles, and I thought it looked great (nice job, Eric!). Verdana doesn’t make me cry like it does some people, I guess.

Re units for printing: I’m sure a ton of processing goes on before even CSS pixels are translated to the screen, so I’m sure the “native language of printers” isn’t mm or pt, although it may be the native language of print designers. The dimensional “precision” Egor argues for is meaningless to my printing situation, where margins, paper size, paper alignment, and other printer idiosyncracies are in play. And speaking of margins, Mr. Hartmann, you can always set your own in your print setup.

posted at 04:16 pm on September 20, 2005 by Dave MacEwan

12 screen capture of whitespace issue

Here is a screen capture of the print preview I am getting. Guess I didn’t describe the problem exactly right.

posted at 04:20 pm on September 20, 2005 by Waylan Limberg

13 Perhaps I did something wrong...

Hello everyone,

I read Eric’s original article on print styles, “Going to Print” and tried to implement the ideas on my own site. However, I was never able to get the browser to actually utilize the style sheet. Either that or I typed it wrong. I used this link structure:

<link rel=“alternate stylesheet” type=“text/css” title=“print” href=”/css/print.css” media=“print” />

When that didn’t work I tried this variation:

<link rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=”/css/print.css” title=“print” media=“print” />

Still to no avail. Any ideas?

~Jonathan

posted at 04:46 pm on September 20, 2005 by Jonathan Landrum

14 Users Do Prefer Print Style Sheets

Slightly off topic, but in case anyone was wondering, we did some usability testing on [url=“http://www.seattlechildrens.org”]our web site[/url] last week and one of the things we checked was our use of print style sheets.

We asked our users to print an internal page (well print preview it, at least) and tell us what they thought of how it looked. 100% (6 out of 6) preferred it to simply printing out the screen view – for all the reasons that you would expect.

For me, this issue is closed.

posted at 05:56 pm on September 20, 2005 by Christian Watson

15 MacEwan stole my comment

If you need extra space in the left hand margin for a special case such as placing the pages in a binder, set those extra margins in the browser and let the width:auto; part do it’s job. Not everyone will have specialized uses for margins.

Also, I’d just like to point out that the last time I ever printed a web page was Meyer’s old “Going to Print” article when it first came out. Then again I rarely print anything and I’d even estimate that roughly half my book purchases in the past year have been in PDF format with the other half being good ole dead tree.

posted at 11:45 pm on September 20, 2005 by Derek Pennycuff

16 Users & Printers prefer print stylesheets

When we developed my company’s website, we designed it for 1024 wide screens with arial/verdana fonts. I implemented the stylesheet so there were no width (let the computer figure out how wide a piece of paper is) and changed all the fonts from “san-serif” to “serif”. A little magic with ‘display:none’ and we created one page brochures for each section. See it at www.buzzhoney.com

posted at 12:07 am on September 21, 2005 by ..ak molteni

17 RE: On fonts and units

Dave, I’m sure you have print orientated fonts on your PC. Surveys of general users do suggest that these fonts are available to designers to add to their font-family rules. I’m not going to quibble over exceptions to the rule. Being able to distinguish between print and screen fonts and to make an assessment whether these can be used is just another part of a designer’s skill base.

I agree printers always interpret given units to fit their own resolution (dot size). However, ‘mm’ and ‘pt’ units are fixed in size and are rendered equally well across most printers, pixels are relative to screen size and resolution and are in my experience ambiguous at best.

These are just two issues not addressed in the ALA print stylesheet. The issue of margins and line length are much trickier because the user also controls these. The ALA correctly in my view assumes an A4 / letter paper size with ‘portrait’ page orientation. Also it reflects the identity of the website very well. Again, a job well done.

posted at 06:14 am on September 21, 2005 by Egor Kloos

18 Overlapping Text

I am seeing the same rendering issues noted in Comments 10 and 12. In Firefox, when a link is displayed in the print preview, the link text is overlapping the text that preceeds and follows it. In addition, some normal text is overlapping as well. This is a common issue I have noticed with Firefox/Mozilla for a while with print stylesheets. It seems to render/print perfectly in IE however, with the exception that the actual URL is not displayed in the printed version (which is known)

Also, is there a way to accurately preview print CSS displays other than actually going into the browser’s “Print Preview” option?

posted at 12:27 pm on September 21, 2005 by Stephen Clark

19 Why the "all" media type?

To help me be a better developer, could you explain why you used the “all” media type instead of “screen”. Wouldn’t it have been easier to create specific styles just for print without worrying about the screen styles? Also if you modify the screen style, don’t you now have more work to do since you have to revisit the print style sheet?

Am I wrong? I really want to know.

posted at 04:03 pm on September 21, 2005 by Tanny O'Haley

20 "all" includes "handheld" - is that safe?

This is by no way a knock on the styles that are output. The majority is a couple of borders and some backgrounds. I imagine that even this “screen” css (the stuff I’m looking at right now on my monitor) would serve up pretty well on a handheld device. Granted the biggest offender of ignoring ‘handheld’ (cough Treo) is also a very popular browser. Although I believe they’re switching to windows mobile for Treo 670 – the fact of the matter is, you’re serving print, is handheld next? It’s as easy as doing the same stuff… knocking out floats, clearing columns, remove background images.

All in all, it’s a solid style sheet for Print. Great work.

posted at 11:01 pm on September 21, 2005 by Dustin Diaz