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We'll cover two approaches to printing from the web:
Examples:
The articles on A List Apart generally look much different when printed from how they look on the screen.
fish4.html has been enhanced for printing. Try out printing (without using your printing budget) by choosing "File | Print | Preview" from your browser, and see how the print preview looks different from the "screen view".
You can set different styles in the <head> section of a document like this:
<style type="text/css" media="print"> ... </style>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="default.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />Possible media attributes include print, screen, all, aural, handheld, and others.
body{ font-size: 12pt; }
In your print stylesheet, you should set the background color to white, and set the foreground color to something dark. E.g.:
body{ background-color: #fff; color: #000 } #content{ background-color: #fff; }
Your site's navigation is usually unnecessary (and generally unusable) on a printed page.
If navigation links are all in one division, you can hide them on what's printed out by setting display: none in your print stylesheet.
.sidebar{ display:none; }
In print, you won't need to allocate the space for the the sidebar division, and you'd like the text to spread out over the whole width of the page (less some convenient amounts at the left and right...)
#content{ padding-left: 20px;padding-right: 20px; margin: 0 auto; } #lotsatext{ margin-left: 0px; }
Of course, you won't be able to click any links on the printed page. But there is a sneaky way to tell the browser to print out the URL associated with a link so that someone could use the information on the page to get to the link location. Browsers that are fully CSS-2 compliant print out the URL after the link text with this style rule:
#lotsatext a:link:after, #lotsatext a:visited:after { content: " (" attr(href) ") "; font-size: 80%; }
pdf or portable document format is a human-readable document description standard invented by Adobe.
Choose "File | Print | Save as PDF..." from any program. That's it!
...it's a little more complicated
Some programs have ways of exporting to a pdf. MS-Word had a 'pdf-maker' toolbar that you could turn on:
The most general way that will work with any program that can print to a printer involves:
Under windows, when you choose "file | print" from any software, you can choose on the next dialog box to print to a file instead of to the printer. As long as your printer is a postscript printer, if you check the box on the print menu to print to a file instead of to a printer, the resulting file will be a postscript file:
Postscript is also a page description language from Adobe. On-campus, you can use the Adobe distiller (look under "Programs | Adobe | Acrobat" to convert postscript (.ps) files (or "encapsulated postscript"--.eps files) to pdf files.
Away from campus, there is also a free program "Ghostscript" that can open and display postscript files on a PC, and also save .ps files as .pdf.
Overall, this allows us to recommend pdf mainly for two situations: