21 Firefox Print Preview is Flawed

Waylan, the print preview screen shot you are showing is from Firefox. Firefox seems to have some serious bugs in Print Preview (on Windows since there is no internal Print Preview on FF Mac). If you really want to see what a page will print out as, you need to select “Print” in Firefox without going through the Print Preview function first. That’s been my experience.

Of course the real problem is that many FF users on Win will want to use that Print Preview funtion and will experience the rendering problems of FF’s own internal print rendering. On the Mac, if you run OS X’s own Print Preview from the Print dialog box, there is not the same issue. I don’t know how it is on Linux.

posted at 02:19 pm on September 22, 2005 by John Lascurettes

22 Print page or print article?

I guess what I am questioning here is one level up from the discussion…and something brought aboout by my brother who is a novice.

Not being very technically savvy he wanted to print a page from a website I designed for him, and his problem was the default settings in IE on a PC, with the page set up being wrong and the backgrounds not being set to print.

Should you be restricting the user experience by offering a different expectation to the Print Page command? i.e if I want to print the page because I love the new site design I have to make a screenshot and print that.

This may have come up in the discussion before, and I will scan at a later date to check it out, but I still feel that fundamentally you should not change the appearance of the printout from the Print Page command. I think that the style is better suited to a hyertext or button kink for ‘Print Article’.

posted at 06:13 am on September 23, 2005 by Tony O

23 Print style sheets are fine until...

…you want to avoid the breaking of some page elements, e.g. avoiding the page breaking inside a table. Browsers don’t care about “page-break-inside:avoid”, at least in the case of tables.

posted at 09:17 am on September 23, 2005 by G. I.

24 Awesome

Thanks,

I just found your original article today – and was getting ready to dig into one of my muticolumn sites to try this out.

How great that you posted such a clear followup to the issues you encountered in rolling your code out.

aloha,
dave

posted at 03:40 pm on September 23, 2005 by Dave Price

25 Finally !

I am so pleased to see print being (re)addressed, and I am glad to get some guidelines and answers to some of my problems. I heartily concur with Mikes comments about users insisting on being able to print. I believe designers are underestimating the demand for printing pages and note that on searching useit.com Jakob Nielson last wrote about print (other than to bag PDF) in 1996 !

I develop some small sites for local (country Qld Australia) B&B’s & tour operators who insist that pages print ‘well’. It is their experience that their customers arrive from Brisbane clutching a print of something from the site( usually the booking confirmation – but could be any page that contains an address – and all mine do) in their hot little hands. One client even insisted that I add a ‘mud map’ to each PRINTED page (an img classed with display:none;) for this very reason.

Many of my clients are on really slow phone lines (19K max) and pay by the hour for internet connections (and as for a 2nd phone line for the internet – may as well ask the local telco for the moon !) so their strategy is to scan the page quickly determine it may answer whatever it is they want to know & print it for later reading.

It is my experience that Opera 8 also prints badly and the developers really don’t seem to care. I long for the day when browsers actually obey the css orphans, widows and page breaks !

posted at 02:44 am on September 24, 2005 by Kim Mihaly

26 Preview artifacts

I did notice abundance in print preview artifacts (overlappings etc.) in Opera as well as in Firefox or Explorer. However, when I printed out several articles from ALA through Opera 8.50 using HP PSC 1510, results were impressive to say the least—everything was in right order without any problems at all.

posted at 05:44 am on September 25, 2005 by Eugene Kravtsov

27 Middle American English

Your main points are well taken, however, I get the impression that you must be from the UK or Canada. Here, in the United States, we don’t ask “after” something, we ask “about” it. That is, users asked about the print styles.

posted at 06:44 am on September 25, 2005 by Joseph P. Dempsey, Sr.

28 RE: Print page or print article?

Should you be restricting the user experience by offering a different expectation to the Print Page command? i.e if I want to print the page because I love the new site design I have to make a screenshot and print that.

At first, I was going to ask something simple:

• Since it isn’t hard to make a screenprint—‘print screen’ utilities exist (and are fairly easy to use) on both Windows and Macintosh—what’s the problem?

Then I remembered that I had dealt with this issue before, while designing the style sheets (print and screen) for my employer’s intranet. The same question came up: “We love the design … why won’t it print?” I showed them (our usability mavens) the Alt+‘Print Screen’ shortcut. They were pleased that this capability exists, but they still wanted to know why. So, I explained it in terms of usability:

1. Content is king.
2. Navigation, hyperlinks, buttons, and other ‘online’ gewgaws are not.
3. Generally, if someone prints a page, it’s because the page has important content, not clever navigation, or excellent button design, or something else.

1. So, why burden printing visitors with something that’s less than useless—because it doesn’t do anything—on the printed page? Especially since creating screenprints really isn’t hard …

They allowed the print styles to stay “as is”.

posted at 07:25 am on September 25, 2005 by Kurtis Kroon

29 Untitled

“Verdana and Arial are fonts that shouldn’t be used in print work especially considering printers often have better alternatives already available.”

The verdana is a font for displaying on screens, the Arial is a font designed to b printed though…

posted at 09:35 am on September 26, 2005 by Niek Emmen

30 RE: RE: Print page or print article?

You missed the point here. If a user selects ‘Print’ or ‘Print Page’ from the browser (not the page) then you are changing their expectations. In as much as web developers do not like browsers altering the appearance of their websites because they do not conform to Standards or have proprietry code, I do not feel that a website should allow code to change the way a page prints out at an application level.

In other words if Iselect ‘File’ and then ‘Print…’

A print out of what I see in the browser is what I expect.

As for the idea that screen capture is simple to do – I think you are disregarding a large proportion of non-savvy users and as a genral rule I would never assume anything.

I think that the re-formatting of content is helpful – but should be kept as a user choice. However, I can also see an argument for the owner of the content taking the view that the contentis theirs and that as the owner they will stipulate whether the content can be printed or how. But that is another discussion altogether.

posted at 09:37 am on October 3, 2005 by Tony O