Hi all,

I maintain a site for an organization (agc-nm.org) and on a recent visit to their offices, the president of the group happened to be there, and mentioned that when he tries to print pages from the site, the right side gets cut off. I found out he's using IE for Windows and I explained there's a documented bug in IE about the pages being cut off on the right. (I never understood that one and Microsoft gives me emotional hives.)

anyway, he asked about how hard it would be to convert the pages of the site to be printer-friendly (yeah, I guess I should have thought about that from the get-go, huh? oh, well, I'm still learning.) or to give the user an option to open a printer-friendly page on the regular site pages.

How do you all deal with this on your sites? How would you suggest I go about approaching a solution for them? Create printer-friendly HTML pages for content pages that are likely to be printed? PDF versions?

thanks for any advice you might have,
Tracey

I just use an external CSS file, and use Print as my media type when I'm linking to it in the head of the document. But then again I don't use table-based layouts, or anything but XHTML 1.0 Transitional at the moment, and my layouts are heavily dependant on CSS.

Originally Posted by tntcheats

I just use an external CSS file, and use Print as my media type when I'm linking to it in the head of the document.

that sounds really cool, but I have no idea what it means. I'll go find my CSS book.

Originally Posted by tntcheats

But then again I don't use table-based layouts, or anything but XHTML 1.0 Transitional at the moment, and my layouts are heavily dependant on CSS.

In other words, your suggestion won't work for the way my page is laid out?

thanks,
Tracey

Check out...

www.w3schools.com/css/css_mediatypes.asp

Should help

--James

It could if your layout used CSS to define widths and colors.

I'd say that you'd just be better off if you redid the whole thing in CSS though--it'll have more benifits in the long run and is just generally easier to maintain.

Thanks, James, for the link...looks like I have a lot to learn.

tntcheats: I thought I was using CSS, but I guess not to the fullest extent that I could be....thanks for the info!

Tracey

I thought I was using CSS, but I guess not to the fullest extent that I could be....thanks for the info!

No problem
And for future reference: Any website that uses Tables for layout, rather than displaying tabular data (calenders, etc.), isn't suing CSS to the fullest extent that it could be

By the looks of it, that website could be quite easily recreated using CSS using Floats or CSS positioning, if not just the navigation.
After all, it's only 2 columns.

I just looked at the nav article you linked and I'm psyched to try it...thanks!

can anyone recommend a good place to learn more about CSS from the bottom up? that w3schools.com link James pointed out looks good...would that be a wise place for me to start?

thanks!
Tracey