Comments on: Quick Tip: Making a ‘Print This Page’ Button

By: Lazlow

Lazlow — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:40:58 +0000

I think in this context, a print this page button works well – as Chris said, it was used for a Kid’s Zone colouring section. It lets the children, who are probably just getting to grips with a computer, that they can print the page out. It also suggests the designer took print styles into account, to ensure it fits on an A4 page. Though I agree, in most situations print should be left to the browser – with the site simply providing a print stylesheet.

By: Marco De Luca

Marco De Luca — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:44:37 +0000

I habe to admit it: I’ve never been a friend of the “Print this page” function for several reasons:

1. This is not content, but a function. These sort of things should be the domain of the browser, not the website, because a user wants to learn once how to print a page and not check on every website again where this print icon/link might be.

2. Modern browsers offer a page preview, which can help you to save paper. Either the content is resized to fit on one page (or any desired number of pages) or you can print the first page only, if you see, that there is no important content on the following pages.

3. If JavaScript is disabled, you have to make sure, that the print-me link doesn’t show. Otherwise the user will have a link that’s not working. Probably the best way to solve this, is to write out the link with JavaScript, so if it is turned off, no link will even be displayed. A lot of work for functionality not really neccessary.

In my opinion, an acceptable approach would be to switch to a print stylesheet (show print version), so the user sees what will be printed and how the print layout looks like or also just can choose this to get an uncluttered (ad-free) design of that page.

But it’s interesting to see what others think about this.

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:19:24 +0000

@Jermayn: Literally, it means just what you think it does. It’s a stylesheet that a projector would use for styling the site. As you might imagine, there aren’t a whole lot of web-browsing projectors out there you really need to worry about. The reason why you see it I think is for Opera. Opera has a full-screen mode which I think will trigger the projection stylesheet, so you can style things specifically for that scenario.

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:32:16 +0000

dumb question: whats a projection??

By: Lazlow

Lazlow — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:02:35 +0000

The Print stuff I was aware of – but I never knew you could assign more than one media type to a single CSS file, as you’ve shown with:

media=”screen, projection”

Thanks for another great article!