Printing Background colors

[J. B. Moreno]

I read the faq, and it mentions that IE 4 on windows requires setting a
printing option to allow background colors to be printed.

Things change, life goes on, other browsers come into existence....

So, is there a way in CSS to say "Yeah, print these background colors",
without the user having to turn on an option that will then apply to all
pages printed?

Thanks,

--
J.B.Moreno

[Sander Tekelenburg]

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
[...]
The essential thing is to realise that on the 'net the end user is
always in control, not the author. As an author you can make suggestions
as to how you think your content would best be presented, but no more.
You have zero control. The user has all control. (Whether a given user
is aware of that is a different issue.)
As an author, it's my job to at least try to present my stuff in what I
think will be the most effective manner

Agreed. (Except I would say "try to *suggest* a presentation".)

[...]
Letting the reader override what I do is fine, not allowing me to do it in
the first place is another matter entirely.

I don't know much about printing, but I think in practice setting the
background colour to white for print media, which you can do with CSS,
results in no background colour being printed. If a user-agent ignores
that, it will be either because it is broken or because the user chose
to override yours suggestion. In either case, as an author you have no
control.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/%7Etekelenb/>

[J. B. Moreno]

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

-snip-

Letting the reader override what I do is fine, not allowing me to do it
in the first place is another matter entirely.

I don't know much about printing, but I think in practice setting the
background colour to white for print media, which you can do with CSS,
results in no background colour being printed. If a user-agent ignores
that, it will be either because it is broken or because the user chose
to override yours suggestion. In either case, as an author you have no
control.

The issue is that setting the bacground color does NOTHING unless you first
get the user to make a change in his preferences -- IMO this is broken
behavior (not that I expect my opinion to result in a change), if there's a
media type for print, and it specifies a background, then that background
should be used by default.

Since it isn't, I (as the author) have three choices: forget about how it
looks when printed (not an option in this particular case as the whole
point is to go to paper), provide instructions to the user for how to turn
on background printing, or make my own "background " elements which are
really layered foreground elements. But if the author fakes a background,
it's the user that has no control...

--
J.B.Moreno

[Sander Tekelenburg]

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:
[...]
The issue is that setting the bacground color does NOTHING unless you first
get the user to make a change in his preferences [...]

Since it isn't, I (as the author) have three choices: forget about how it
looks when printed (not an option in this particular case as the whole
point is to go to paper)

If printing to paper is the whole point, I'd think it would make more
sense to publish as PDF instead of HTML.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/%7Etekelenb/>

[J. B. Moreno]

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:

J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:

[...]

The issue is that setting the bacground color does NOTHING unless you
first get the user to make a change in his preferences [...]

Since it isn't, I (as the author) have three choices: forget about how
it looks when printed (not an option in this particular case as the
whole point is to go to paper)

If printing to paper is the whole point, I'd think it would make more
sense to publish as PDF instead of HTML.

It's running off of a dynanmic web page, I don't know how to output a PDF
from a webpage...and I wouldn't want any unnecessary steps for the user.
If they clicked on a "print now" button, it should print now, not popup
with something else that then requires them to choose to print it again.

--
J.B.Moreno

[kchayka]

J. B. Moreno wrote:

I don't know how to output a PDF from a webpage

There are many scripts and utilties that do this, I believe there are
several for php alone. google is your friend. ;)

--
Reply email address is a bottomless spam bucket.
Please reply to the group so everyone can share.

[Sander Tekelenburg]

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:
[...]

If printing to paper is the whole point, I'd think it would make more
sense to publish as PDF instead of HTML.

It's running off of a dynanmic web page, I don't know how to output a PDF
from a webpage...

You use whatever scripting language you're comfortable with (IIRC you're
comfortable with Perl) and is available on your server to have some tool
running on your server print the page to PDF (I'm sure there are cli
tools that can do that). You can have a hyperlink activate this process
which, as its final action, returns the PDF. From the user's point of
view it would just be a "download PDF" link. Your server does the magic
of generating that PDF on the fly.
and I wouldn't want any unnecessary steps for the user.
I can't think of a way to make it less than those 2 steps: [1] click
hyperlink to fetch PDF, [2] hit the local print button. I can't discover
anything unnecessary in that.

It might be possible to make that hyperlink activate some piece of
javascript that automagically prints the PDF. But you can't be sure
javascript will be available so shouldn't make things dependant on that.
(In fact I think there's a good chance this sort of extra service will
only confuse users.)
If they clicked on a "print now" button, it should print now, not popup
with something else that then requires them to choose to print it again.

Indeed. So don't call that link "print now", but "download very pretty
printable version" ;)

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/%7Etekelenb/>

[Amedee Van Gasse]

J. B. Moreno schreef:

te******@eurone t.nl wrote:

In article <20************ *******@newsrea der.com>,
J. B. Moreno <pl***@newsread ers.com> wrote:

-snip-

Letting the reader override what I do is fine, not allowing me to do it
in the first place is another matter entirely.

I don't know much about printing, but I think in practice setting the
background colour to white for print media, which you can do with CSS,
results in no background colour being printed. If a user-agent ignores
that, it will be either because it is broken or because the user chose
to override yours suggestion. In either case, as an author you have no
control.

The issue is that setting the bacground color does NOTHING unless you first
get the user to make a change in his preferences -- IMO this is broken
behavior (not that I expect my opinion to result in a change), if there's a
media type for print, and it specifies a background, then that background
should be used by default.

Since it isn't, I (as the author) have three choices: forget about how it
looks when printed (not an option in this particular case as the whole
point is to go to paper), provide instructions to the user for how to turn
on background printing, or make my own "background " elements which are
really layered foreground elements. But if the author fakes a background,
it's the user that has no control...

Excuse me for hijacking this thread, but have you found a solution?
I have a similar problem. A FoxPro program creates a calender with
various colors depending on the type of activity per day. Up to 8
colors are possible.

On screen this looks as requested by the customer, but on paper we just
get empty white squares. The customer cannot change the "print
background colors" setting because of security settings on the Citrix
server.

I tried @media print, but that made no difference.

How can this be solved?

--
Amedee Van Gasse