[WEB4LIB] Re: printing problems with web pages

[Kevin W Bishop]

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Eby
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 9:48 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: printing problems with web pages

Unfortunately creating a stylesheet that will work across many sites
to make the printing work right is not easy. Depending on how
different or complex a site is compared to another you may actually
make the site worse. Applying a stylesheet using the browser options
also applies it to the screen media as well. This could probably be
fixed with a bookmarklet or an extension. This is why I didn't
recommend it.
--------------------------

No, it's not easy.  For this reason and others, there is talk in the
design community about establishing a basic vocabulary of IDs and
CLASSes beyond common HTML selectors that pertain to most sites (e.g.,
"header", "footer", "navbar", etc.); a vocabulary on which we could
build "bigger and better".  

Re. your second point: could we not in our locally defined style sheet
specify in our rules "@media print" for generic selectors in order to
limit those styles to print media?  In other words, although we cannot
specify print style sheets for a browser, we can specify rules for print
media within any style sheet.  

For example: 


@media print {
	body {
		margin:  1.7cm 2cm 1.4cm;
	}
	h2.chapterTitle {
		page-break-before: always;
	}
}


Yes? No?  I've not tested this.  

-kb

___________________________
Kevin W. Bishop > bishopk at rpi.edu
Communication & Collaboration Technologies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute > http://www.rpi.edu/
  RPInfo: http://www.rpi.edu/rpinfo/