Screen vs. print

[Wes Groleau]

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

--
Wes Groleau

Even if you do learn to speak correct English,
whom are you going to speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow

[Eric Jarvis]

Wes Groleau gr**********@freeshell.org wrote:

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Simply having a decent print stylesheet generally works.

--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"

[Wes Groleau]

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Simply having a decent print stylesheet generally works.

Then I guess mine (and the W3C example) is not decent.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Who's the professor for my next class?

--
Wes Groleau
-----------
Daily Hoax: http://www.snopes2.com/cgi-bin/random/random.asp

[Mark Tranchant]

Wes Groleau wrote:

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Simply having a decent print stylesheet generally works.

Then I guess mine (and the W3C example) is not decent.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Who's the professor for my next class?

OK, so now you've clarified that you understand print style sheets. What
do you mean by "look decent"? Give us a URL and some thoughts on what
you're trying to achieve.

Note that most browsers' printing functionality is quite limited.

--
Mark.
http://tranchant.plus.com/

[Spartanicus]

Wes Groleau <gr**********@freeshell.org> wrote:

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Beware of buggy UA media support, some information here:
http://www.codestyle.org/css/media/p...rSummary.shtml

Note that there are media bugs that are not/cannot be expressed in a
table like the above.

--
Spartanicus

[Neal]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:18:13 -0500, Wes Groleau
<gr**********@freeshell.org> wrote:

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Simply having a decent print stylesheet generally works.

Then I guess mine (and the W3C example) is not decent.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Who's the professor for my next class?

Hope I'm not detecting snippiness!

When's a specific question going to be posed, hopefully coupled with a URL
of what didn't work for you? While you're at it, define "decent". Do you
want a similar layout as screen on the printout, do you want a different
but suitable rendering?

Spartanicus' suggestred link
http://www.codestyle.org/css/media/p...rSummary.shtml is really
good, look that over to eliminate any obvious browser ignorance through
how you state the rule.

[Wes Groleau]

Mark Tranchant wrote:

OK, so now you've clarified that you understand print style sheets. What
do you mean by "look decent"? Give us a URL and some thoughts on what
you're trying to achieve.

touché

OK, I guess "decent" is rather vague.

I guess just having all the text on the paper instead of
running off the right edge would be nice for starters.

Apparently "17 cm" is bigger than 8.5 inches to both
IE 6 and NS 7 Safari does seem to print on the page,
but pretty close to the edge, even though I've currently
specified a width of 11cm for printing.

If I could just get the #$%^&#$%^ thing to act like
it's not being completely ignored, then I'd be able
to tweak things.

I changed it to 11 cm, cleared the cache, cleared the history,
hit print again, and no change! I copied the CSS to a different
file, referenced it from a new copy of the web page (different
name, surfed to it, and tried that. No change!

Which is why I was hoping for a _working_ example
to start from. I didn't want to bug you guys for
every little detail. But, if anyone does want to
look, here it is:

http://groleau.freeshell.org/bad-CSS.html

--
Wes Groleau
Free Genealogical Lookups:
http://groleau.freeshell.org/ref/lookups.shtml

[Wes Groleau]

Spartanicus wrote:

Beware of buggy UA media support, some information here:
http://www.codestyle.org/css/media/p...rSummary.shtml

That looks like it will be very helpful. Thanks.

Maybe I should distribute my document(s) on a bootable
CD with Apache and Opera 7.11 pre-configured. :-)

Or put the whole thing in PDF. :-)

Problem with PDF is that I wanted to carry a subset of
the site in print and have it look sufficiently like
the web version that someone going after the missing
parts wouldn't get lost even if they were inexperienced
with the web. Having two PDFs, one with pages left out
is just as bad as having to maintain screen and printer
versions of every web page. Plus PDFs, being monolithic,
offer a loading time problem.

--
Wes Groleau
Heroes, Heritage, and History
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau/

[Darin McGrew]

Wes Groleau <gr**********@freeshell.org> wrote:

I guess just having all the text on the paper instead of
running off the right edge would be nice for starters.
IME, this is usually a symptom of a fixed-width layout that doesn't adapt
gracefully to the available display area. Just because you're providing a
print style sheet doesn't mean you know the size of the paper, the width of
the printer-enforced margins, the width of the browser-enforced margins,
the size of the font, etc.
http://groleau.freeshell.org/bad-CSS.html

The URL of an HTML document that uses this style sheet would be helpful.
But just looking at the CSS, it seems my initial impression was right.
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanfordalumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp.com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"Predictions are difficult, especially about the future." - Casey Stengel

[Eric Jarvis]

Wes Groleau gr**********@freeshell.org wrote:

Is there a good how-to and/or example of
a simple way to have a web page look decent
on both screen (in most browsers) and in print?

The example in the W3C CSS manual does NOT do it.

Simply having a decent print stylesheet generally works.

Then I guess mine (and the W3C example) is not decent.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Who's the professor for my next class?

They are all sitting in the senior common room waiting fort you to
actually decide what class you want to take.

It is possible to make print stylehseets that work well, without knowing
what problem you have with the w3c print stylesheet there's no way of
suggesting how to get around the problems other than to simply do it
right.

Posting to Usenet 1.02 is the queue over there ->

--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"

[Wes Groleau]

Darin McGrew wrote:

IME, this is usually a symptom of a fixed-width layout that doesn't adapt
gracefully to the available display area. Just because you're providing a
print style sheet doesn't mean you know the size of the paper, the width of the printer-enforced margins, the width of the browser-enforced margins,
the size of the font, etc.

No, I don't know the size of the paper for everybody,
but I aimed it at 8.5 x 11 paper (99% of US printers),
by saying 17 cm. Not saying that's the ideal way to go,
but I thought it would be a good place to start. But
the two most common browsers both run the text off the
edge a little. Then I changed it to 11 cm and netscape
changed nothing.

And the font face and size are specified, though
Internet Explorer seemed to think that when I changed
width I made a mistake--it changed the font size instead!

http://groleau.freeshell.org/bad-CSS.html

The URL of an HTML document that uses this style sheet would be helpful.
But just looking at the CSS, it seems my initial impression was right.

Almost all of them on the site, e.g., http://groleau.freeshell.org/

(Though in many of them, you can't see the "run-off" because it
only shows on the longest lines.)

--
Wes Groleau

"A man with an experience is never
at the mercy of a man with an argument."
-- Ron Allen

[Darin McGrew]

I wrote:

The URL of an HTML document that uses this style sheet would be helpful.
But just looking at the CSS, it seems my initial impression was right.

Wes Groleau <gr**********@freeshell.org> wrote: Almost all of them on the site, e.g., http://groleau.freeshell.org/

(Though in many of them, you can't see the "run-off" because it
only shows on the longest lines.)

FWIW, I got several 404 Not Found responses.

Anyway, using http://groleau.freeshell.org/education/K201/ as a test case,
I saw the clipping of the right edge when I configured my browser to use
1cm print margins, but not when I configured my browser to use 0.5cm print
margins. So your page can cope with a display area that's about 20.5cm
wide, but not with a display area that's about 19.5cm wide.

So I'm back to my original suggestion: Don't assume that you know how wide
the available display area is, even in a print style sheet.

And you should probably fix some of the CSS errors reported by
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
--
Darin McGrew, da***@TheRallyeClub.org, http://www.TheRallyeClub.org/
A gimmick car rallye is not a race, but a fun puzzle testing your
ability to follow instructions. Upcoming gimmick car rallye in
Silicon Valley: Monstah Mash 2004 (Saturday, October 2)

[Wes Groleau]

Darin McGrew wrote:

FWIW, I got several 404 Not Found responses.
Website used to be elsewhere. Haven't finished moving it.
Former host required a not-so-convenient directory structure,
so some of the relative links are broken.
Anyway, using http://groleau.freeshell.org/education/K201/ as a test case,
I saw the clipping of the right edge when I configured my browser to use
1cm print margins, but not when I configured my browser to use 0.5cm print
margins. So your page can cope with a display area that's about 20.5cm
wide, but not with a display area that's about 19.5cm wide.
Even though it's specified to be 17 cm -- excuse me, 11 cm wide.
This is what I find so confusing.
So I'm back to my original suggestion: Don't assume that you know how wide
the available display area is, even in a print style sheet.
Yeah, well, I'm still trying to grasp the implications of that.
And you should probably fix some of the CSS errors reported by
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

:-) I suppose I should--but you should have seen how
many errors it had before I modified it, i.e., when it was
still EXACTLY as put in the W3C document !
:-)
--
Wes Groleau

After the christening of his baby brother in church, Jason sobbed
all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him
three times what was wrong. Finally, the boy replied, "That preacher
said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, and I wanted to
stay with you guys."