Flash Ad prevents article from printing

When printing, only the flash ad prints

[Asif]

So there's a big box ad at the bottom of all articles on the site. The ad is randomly generated. What happens is that sometimes a particular flash ad appears, and if you try to print out the page, the article body doesn't print, but the flash ad does, and that too at the top of the page. Any ideas?

Thanks

[tedster]

Can you save the flash file next time you see it? I'm guessing (purely guessing) this could be done with an actionscript exploit in the flash file. But it sounds nasty.

[MWpro]

What if you put the flash in a div, say with the id of "ad." And then you hide it in the print section of the style sheet.

So something like this (I am not 100% sure on the syntax):

<style type="text/css"> 
/*all other styles here*/ 
@media print { 
   div#ad { 
     display: none; 
   } 
} 
</style>

Does it still give you problems if you do this?

[cmatcme]

Disable flash in your browser or in your firewall. Then it will only have the article to print!

cmatcme

[Asif]

i forgot to mention that i had already tried wrapping div tags around the ad and used the noPrint style, and it didn't work. i was wondering if it had anything to do with the iframes wrapping the ad, and tried removing them as well, to no avail.

disabling flash isn't a good idea, since users will also have to do that.

[cmatcme]

Is it your website?

Ohh right then. You could create a printer-friendly .txt version. Then the ad wouldn't be able to add itself to your page.

cmatcme

[Asif]

well a printer friendly txt version is already there, but it still doesn't work. any other suggestions?

ps: this is a weird, weird problem.

[cmatcme]

How about putting a message at the bottom of the article such as:

Sorry but this page does not print due to ad problems. Please download a small text version [example.com] and print a copy of that instead. 
For download instructions click here [example.com]. Thank you.

If .txt doesn't work then you could use .rtf instead. Most computers support that.

cmatcme