Page (Table) Width vs Printable Pages

Looking for clean printing of HTML pages.

[doobie]

Have read literature on setting page widths and decided on 744 px. as optimum.

Problem: Page/text is partially cut off on printing anything over 680 px. We know our users print a number of our HTML files. Percentage width seems to work fine, however we're seeing more and more fixed width sites. Designing to 680 is pretty confining!

Are webmasters using fixed widths not concerned with printing issues, or is there a solution here? (Let us know if you've solved the problem by returning to percent?!)

[olwen]

On my intranet pages I use a printer-specific stylesheet to allow me to hide some elements. Perhaps you could do that for your widths.

[Eric_Jarvis]

I find keeping the site fluid solves most printing problems

our site is used a lot in a number of countries where web access is difficult...often this is dealt with by printing off the pages and showing them around

[DrDoc]

Will they print the entire site, or random pages?

If the former, have you thought about offering Word documents?

Also, have you looked into Perl tools like HTML->PDF or similar?

[AlbinoRhyno]

Agree with olwen. No need for a user to print off your navigation, all they want in a printoff is the content. Either a print stylesheet (recommended) or a pre-formatted print-version of the page launched via a javascript "print this article" button.

For a resource on print stylesheets, see [url="http://www.alistapart.com/stories/goingtoprint/"]CSS Beyond the Browser: Going to Print[/url].

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