How do you make a Printer Friendly Page?

[cdgeorge]

What's the most efficient way of turning your web page into a printer friendly page... including adding pages breaks etc?

[BlobFisk]

Hi cdgeorge,

There are two approaches here - one is to create a second version of your page that is basically text only.

The other approach is to use CSS, or more specifically, a print CSS. Check out the CSS Forum [webmasterworld.com] for a whole lot more on that. What a print stylesheet does is to send a different set of style rules to the browser to apply when the page is being printed. This was you can turn odd elements that don't need to be printed, make colours more printer friendly, change margins, font sizes etc. It is a very powerful tool.

HTH

[NeedScripts]

You might also want to look into options like PhPrint ( [google.com...] ) We are using this script on our website and it only takes couple of minutes to setup and works great.

Hope this helps.

[monkeythumpa]

At 72 DPI an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paer is 612 pixels wide. Most websites are 700+ wide. That means the printer will print your nav and the first 8 out of the 10 words per line. You may think about getting rid of the nav on those pages, making a layout that is 612 wide or a fluid layout and let the printer format it.

And page breaks are hard to do, you can try to have a break every 792 pixels (11" @ 72DPI), but with header info and print margins this would be tough to achieve. I would say go with PDFs, you will be able to control it better.

[XtendScott]

If your in for site redesign for static pages, CSS is one of the best technologies to learn. You can turn off "navigation", print text header rather than the fancy graphic, <div> layouts print in sequence where <table> does not collaps for printing.

If you have a database driven site you can create a "print" template.