Discuss: CSS Design: Going to Print
by Eric Meyer
- Editorial Comments
2 Very Good Article!
As usual, ALA has put up a great and informative article.
A browser-related note: currently, the Mac version of Opera doesn’t handle point-sizes in print stylesheets very well. Opera uses 96 dpi on screen, which is what Windows uses and close to what the W3C recommends (90 dpi, IIRC). However, in print, 72 points make an inch. This is why the original Mac’s use of 72 dpi made it perfect for desktop publishing. The Mac version of Opera uses its 96 dpi definition in print as well, making the output too large. I don’t believe there is any workaround at this time. I’ve reported the bug to Opera.
Also, a tip for people making print stylesheets for sites that use absolute positioning: you should declare your absolutely-positioned divs as position:static (and probably also use width:auto) in your print stylesheet to return them to the normal document flow, or you may get strange results.
posted at 07:20 pm on May 9, 2002 by Amarnath Santhanam
3 on happy designer here
over the past few months i have come to love CSS and i now do everything with it, or at least so i thought up till now. i thank you for writing this article. it will no doubt come in very handy to me :D
posted at 11:38 pm on May 9, 2002 by mydimension
4 Way Cool
Amazing article, I was very impressed. Having used this method myself, I found it useful to have a full article going over the topic in greater depth.
Combining this with a style switcher should make for good usability – I’ve long wanted an easy way to make good pages, that work well on multiple devices, and for people with visual disabilities, and this sure is a good approach for printers.
posted at 12:38 am on May 10, 2002 by Adam
5 On form, as ever
Excellent article. I was prompted to experiment with CSS print version trickery by posts in the old forum. This article encourages me to go back and tinker some more.
Oh how I miss the old CSS forum ….
posted at 12:54 am on May 10, 2002 by Sainkho
6 On form, as ever
Excellent article. I was prompted to experiment with CSS print version trickery by posts in the old forum. This article encourages me to go back and tinker some more.
Oh how I miss the old CSS forum ….
posted at 12:56 am on May 10, 2002 by Sainkho
8 Previewing tip!
Don’t waste paper testing the results of your new print-only stylesheets. The Print Preview function in both IE and Moz will let you see how your stylesheet is coming on – without the need to print it.
posted at 01:16 am on May 10, 2002 by Drew McLellan
9 nice one
Great article, the absence of print style sheets from virtually every major site has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. Hopefully their sluggish in-house developers will get round to learning enough CSS sometime in the next few years.
One teeny weeny almost microscopic nitpicking point about ALA’s printer-friendliness: it’d be just that little bit more slick if the images used transparency (obviously there’d still be pixels around the edges matted onto the background colour to retain anti-aliasing, but it’d be an improvement).
posted at 01:48 am on May 10, 2002 by Matt Round
10 fantastic
An excellent article, especially well timed for me (thx) as I am trying to get all the new sites to consider css print as well as screen. Thanks to ALA I am well armed to do so.
[Small point the link to print different, the second page of that article appears blank when printed.]
posted at 04:34 am on May 10, 2002 by burtware
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1 outputting link URLs with CSS
Good article. I love it when programmers’ eyes light up when I say “Nah, don’t do a print specific page, I’ll handle it with CSS.”
Outputting links’ URLs is a great idea, but limiting this to bodycopy elements, and going with a small font size works better. Print this article in Netscape 6.2 and the title image, which is wrapped in a <H1>, spits out a superhuge <H1> styled URL that doesn’t wrap. Yikes.
posted at 01:56 pm on May 9, 2002 by nathan