What is the best way, or what are some of the ways, to make online articles printable? I think they should be printable without having to print the entire page including logos, graphics, other articles, etc.

Tiggy made me think of this with one of her annoyances. See this thread. There are many sites that have articles that people would like to read at their leisure. To accomodate the reader, what measures can/should the webmaster take to help?

Thoughts on:

• URL to article without "distractions"?
• Downloadable files?
• Print .exe files?
• Whatever?

Dave

While I don't have time right now to go into much detail, I've got a few ideas as to how you can approach the problem.

I myself have written an internal print routine, if a page has it and you pass it the right query string, then it will show a more printable version of the page... I expanded this a little with the guides I have by offering a way to print the whole thing as one document.

Another way is with CSS and media type "print" - setting display to "none" for all the bits you want to hide when it prints. Doesn't work for all browsers but can go some way to making a page more printable.

HTH

I've seen sites that have a Print link under an article. When clicked, it sends the printable version to the printer (or to a file). Tiggy and I talked about this today and she suggested checking Dynamic Drive for a java script. So I checked and found an interesting article about using the link tag. Click to view the article.

Basically, <link rel=alternate media=print href="printversion.doc"> is used in the head and when print is selected from IE4+, the "printversion.doc" will be printed instead of the entire page. Of course, the article name would not be "printversion.doc", but the actual name of the doc used on that page.

I also want to archive several articles on my site. Could the "printversion.doc" be used with a link just to read that doc online? Should I treat it as a pop-up if someone wants to read it online?

Hope that wasn't too vague. I'm actually looking to make it easier to print an article, AND to be able to archive the article with it still being available for printing. Should the print version and the archive be handled separately?

All thoughts and suggestions welcome.

Dave

I like those click here to print this page links. I am not sure how they work it because I never looked though. I have never needed a page to be printed.

I can think though of many graphic design tutorial websites that should include an option for printing the text without the images.

Heidi

Linking the document in the way that you describe DMo224 works a treat, even on my dynamic pages...

as for your question on using Word Documents online, then there is nothing to stop you offering your visitors the printable copy of the document - just create a link to it like you would a HTML page.

About archives, well, I don't have that problem... my articles are my printable pages so I don't have the issue of space to deal with in that sense. You could make your archives Word Documents only, but this could impact the search engines particularly if you are restructuring the archives for the first time. If you make them HTML only you loose the printablity - I suggest that you either use both if you have the room for it...

If I was forced to choose one or the other, I'd go for the HTML archives for spiderability... you can always add a note saying it is available in Word format on request if you really need to...

Thanks!

If I made the archived articles html pages with a white background and without graphics and all the navigation, would this make it spiderable and still be a printable copy? And then I wouldn't need a Word doc file too, agree?

That should allow me to make an archived version of the present article, but call it the print version until it is archived.

What are thoughts about an archive article list having pop-up windows for the articles instead of full windows?

Dave