Printing web pages

[Mona]

Hi

I'm having a lot of trouble printing my web pages. There are different problems for different browsers. Is there a good website which tells you how to fix printing problems? I have a lot of them!

Mona

 

[Rowan W]

I guess the most obvious problem is IE's lack of the shrink to fit feature, which most browsers already have. This feature has been added to IE7 beta1, so that's almost one problem out of the way.

Another thing you can do is create a specific CSS file for your page that only takes effect when someone tries to print the page.

If you're trying to print someone elses pages then theres probably not a lot you can do.

What are the main problems you have for each browser?

 

[Mona]

I did create a separate CSS file for printing, but I wasn't sure how to link it to my web pages. I tried this:

<LINK rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="screen" href="board.css"
media="print" href="print.css">

But this caused a few problems. I think Netscape refused to acknowledge media="screen" so would only show the print version. In Opera, I think full screen mode only showed the print version. It seemed fine to IE and Mozilla.

If I can work out how to link to a separate style sheet, is it alright if your printed pages look boring?

In terms of the problems I'm currently having, they are:

Opera - fine, but prints blue background to my menu

Netscape - mostly fine but won't print more than one page, even though there might be five. Menu doesn't appear.

IE - when a page is long, it squishes everything in the contents section into one narrow column on the left. My 'news' section on the right is still fine

Mozilla - when a page is long, in print preview the text just goes off the page down the screen. Will only print one page.

Any help, anyone? Maybe some of my code is wrong.

Mona

 

[Mona]

Hi everyone

All I really want to know is how to link a separate style sheet for print to my web pages. I'll sort out the other stuff from there. Thanks.

Mona

 

[Rajo]

i don't know this can help or not
but u can always make a print screen from the page and edit with photo editor

 

[Don]

Are these dynamic pages? PHP/mysql?

If they are the solution is fairly simple... simply make a link to a page called print.php which pulls the same content from the database, but uses the printer friendly css layout.

If they aren't, hmnn... not really sure.