Web pages are these days full with more and more intricate images, ads and links all over the place. Consequently, users are finding them very hard to read. The difficulty is further aggravated with the eye-strain caused by most monitors. So in place of reading through these lines, it is always a superior option to read them in print.

To take a print-out of your web page, you necessitate generating a printer-friendly web page. There are a number of disparities about how to write a printer-friendly page. Some people experience that only the article content and title should be included on the page. Other developers just do away with the side and top navigation or reinstate them with text links at the bottom of the article. Some sites take away advertising, other sites take away some advertising and others still go with all of the advertising unharmed.

There are various alternatives existing to make your site printer-friendly. The foremost one is to create a copy of each page or article and physically remove all the non-printer-friendly objects. The subsequent option is to make use of a (CGI, PHP, JavaScript, other) script to eliminate the non-printer friendly stuff on the fly. The final and most effectual alternative is to write down a style sheet for print.

The shortcoming to alternative one should be reasonably noticeable to most people. It is very labor intensive and needs that for every page on your site, you produce a second photocopy page. The alternative two is the most general selection right now, because it alleviates the troubles of alternative one and with a little transformation in how you write your Web pages, you can establish it for every page on your site. But if you don’t have access to CGI or you just don’t feel at ease with programming, this method can be demanding, if not unattainable.

In this case, Cascading Style Sheets come to your rescue. Luckily, CSS was not written with just Web pages in mind and with just a few extra codes you can create a printer style sheet that removes all the non-friendly options on your page and even takes into account issues such as typography and readability. You also don’t have to write two different copies of your page or do any programming to build it.

As with screen style sheets, you use the <link> element to define the print style sheet your Web page should use:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print” />

The only difference between this link element and the link to your screen style sheet is the attribute:

media=”print”

Most style sheets are written for the screen, so the media can be left off, or written as:

media=”screen”

When you build a print-friendly style sheet, you need to keep in mind all the rules like change colors to black on white, change the font to serif, watch the font size, underline all links, remove non-essential images, remove navigation, remove some or most of the advertising and remove all JavaScript, Flash and animated images.

Tags: CSS Media Types to Print Web Pages