Print Style Sheets?

Brooke posted this at 15:45 — 26th April 2007.

Joined: Feb 1999

Hello everyone.

I just asked Megan about printing on the web. Should you consider it or not?

I want to know what everybody thinks about this. Is it good practice? Is that what web designers should always do? How do you go about making sure that your site will print?

You can read Megan's article here: http://www.meganmcdermott.com/2007/04/13/all-sites-should-have-print-stylesheets/

teammatt3 posted this at 16:59 — 26th April 2007.

He has: 2,102 posts

Joined: Sep 2003

I think it's a good idea, especially if you have a site where the target audience is old (they usually don't like to read on the computer). I don't do it on any of my sites, except for one, and the target audience is 65+ . One thing not mentioned in that post was the need to block off the print pages from spiders. You'll probably run into dup content issues with Google if you don't, you wouldn't want that.

Megan posted this at 19:13 — 26th April 2007.

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

teammatt3;218415 wrote: One thing not mentioned in that post was the need to block off the print pages from spiders. You'll probably run into dup content issues with Google if you don't, you wouldn't want that.

?? I'm not sure what you mean. A print stylesheet doesn't create a separate page, it's just a different stylesheet served for printing. So the SE shouldn't be trying to access a separate version of the page or anything... unless I'm misunderstanding something?

I do plan to write an article about this for A Padded Cell. If you've got a well designed, css-based site it should be pretty easy to do. You just have to hide your menus and stuff and maybe play with font sizes a bit. There are more complicated things you can do if you want to, like breaking pages in certain places and things like that.

As I said in my blog post, I think print stylesheets are needed for most, if not all sites (and yes, I'm guity!). Even if you think people won't want to print stuff. You never know, and not having a good print stylesheet causes big annoyances (unless, of course, your site prints well enough without one). I even figured out how to make any web page print nicely by editing the source and reloading from cache in Opera.

Megan
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Brooke posted this at 17:51 — 26th April 2007.

She has: 681 posts

Joined: Feb 1999

So, if you do not create one - then what do you do if the site does not print well? Nothing? Make printable pdf's? Or just do...welll...nothing?

teammatt3 posted this at 19:49 — 26th April 2007.

He has: 2,102 posts

Joined: Sep 2003

Quote: ?? I'm not sure what you mean. A print stylesheet doesn't create a separate page, it's just a different stylesheet served for printing. So the SE shouldn't be trying to access a separate version of the page or anything... unless I'm misunderstanding something?

So you're telling me I don't have to make a separate page for a printer friendly version? The printer picks up the printer stylesheet automatically? Dang, I've been doing a ton of extra work for nothing. So you're right, it won't mess with rankings because you aren't creating a separate page. I wonder why most other sites do create a separate page for printing. A lot of CMSs do it, vBulletin does it .

Well if it's that easy then I don't have an excuse to get it done. But I'll have to wait for Megan's article on APC so I know what I'm doing.

Megan posted this at 20:37 — 26th April 2007.

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

teammatt3;218419 wrote: So you're telling me I don't have to make a separate page for a printer friendly version? The printer picks up the printer stylesheet automatically? Dang, I've been doing a ton of extra work for nothing. So you're right, it won't mess with rankings because you aren't creating a separate page. I wonder why most other sites do create a separate page for printing. A lot of CMSs do it, vBulletin does it .

Yes, exactly! No separate pages. You can do the same for mobile devices.

The reason why some CMS's do this is because they sometimes have content split up on multiple pages and need to combine them into one page to create a printable version. However, there are several reasons why it's not a good idea to divide up content into pages to begin with - print stylesheets being one of them.

(vBulletin is a pain in the rear for so many reasons.... )

Megan
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Brooke posted this at 20:14 — 26th April 2007.

She has: 681 posts

Joined: Feb 1999

Thanks you two. You hashed out a lot of questions that I had!

demonhale posted this at 04:13 — 27th April 2007.

He has: 3,278 posts

Joined: May 2005

Yeah... The Power of CSS... You can check my Lame attempt for multiple Stylesheets with Mobile Device and Print preview on this site http://www.weborganize.net/aboutus.html, if you have FF, go to view page style and select the available stylesheets...

If you want the easy route, use a CMS like Mambo/Joomla, they automatically add a printer friendly version on every post if you activate the feature...

kb posted this at 05:52 — 27th April 2007.

He has: 1,380 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

I've recently been working with some printing options, and I did two things:

a) They have a "print page" option, which just basically reloads the page with a print stylesheet instead
b) They also have a "save as PDF" option...I used the PDFgen library (which was pretty easy)

The moral of the story? It was pretty easy. I agree that sites should have at least one print option, it's too easy not to.

markwiseman posted this at 05:04 — 13th June 2007.

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Joined: Jun 2007

The only problem I can find with using a print stylesheet is that you remove the users options to print out the page as they see it on the screen. As far as I can see the print style sheet is used even if you print the page from the the brower's print menu.
Mark