Comments on: Don’t Rely on Background Colors Printing

By: Offene Tabs: Webdesign & Wordpress - stefan.waidele.info

Offene Tabs: Webdesign & Wordpress - stefan.waidele.info — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:01:36 +0000

[...] Don’t Rely on Background Colors Printing [...]

By: Building a Print CSS | Full On Design

Building a Print CSS | Full On Design — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:59:17 +0000

[...] Don’t Rely on Background Colors Printing – A really neat article on why using colours in your print CSS is just a bad idea. [...]

By: Daniel Groves

Daniel Groves — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:17:04 +0000

@chriscoyier

The site in question now uses you meathod for it’s print styles ;)

By: Dormgear.net

Dormgear.net — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:25:35 +0000

Very good point Luke.

Perhaps this means Chris should write another great article about print.css and what attributes are printer safe and supported. *hint hint nudge nudge * Wise idea migrating away from PDF. My only suggestion would be to have a dynamic PDF generator on the fly, because otherwise it’d just be too much time and upkeep.

Cheers,
Dormgear.net

By: whiskey

whiskey — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:54:08 +0000

I hate being that guy, but this can be done.
It’s either a matter of getting some PHP code to parse the table and get GD to render the cell contents as images (and maybe cache them) substituting what’s already there, or getting Jquery to parse the table and substitute the cells contents with a prerendered JPEG or GIF file.

Now I said that THIS can be done because we are dealing with a finite amount of alternatives (31 numbers times 5 colors = 155 alternatives), and we would still have to deal with the month headers.

We could also use fpdf library to render it as a PDF file on the server side…

What we should do though is instruct the audience that if they want the website to print-as-seen they could download and install tools like Cute PDF, Bullzip PDF and more (this are free) to then print to PDF file and print that to paper.

By: Trever

Trever — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:58:35 +0000

Chris, excellent, and I’m coming to a similar crossroad at the moment. As savagecorp said, would you mind sharing how you’re creating a calendar dynamically? Right on.

By: Allen Baranov

Allen Baranov — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:34:56 +0000

I have to agree with rzea that your solution doesn’t scale and comments that the reference can be rather confusing.

However, I must say that this is a very good idea. Essentially, you are asking potential customers to waste their own resources (paper and ink) to help you make a sale and the less ink (black is cheaper too) and paper they need to use – the better so well done on a cheaper solution and if there is no colour then it should print out quicker too so no waste of time.

All-in-all – a great solution.

I wish that more people used a special print CSS sheet. One major gripe that I have is that serifs are easier to read on paper and sans serif is better on screen. With just that change some blogs that I follow could be much easier to read offline.

By: Allen Baranov

Allen Baranov — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:20:14 +0000

Simple. A number of websites have white text on a dark background. To print those out would use up an entire printer ink cartridge. Its better not to print out the background.

By: Pelly

Pelly — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:02:30 +0000

Great Post……..I would like to try this…

By: savagecorp

savagecorp — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:12:23 +0000

Hi Chris – Great post. I was hoping sometime you could do a post on how you implemented that calendar, and how it works.

It’d be great to incorporate something small like that on a blog with a jQuery slider to the corresponding post/ even date.