The premise is questionable. A webpage lives in its own medium, or it is its own medium. It is normally meant to be read with an electronic device, to be interactive and linked, though those devices can be quite different of course.<p>But by printing a webarticle, you are transforming it into another medium, onto paper. Therefore it is actually a very strong assumption - and one I don't follow - to <i>"expect them to support the habits of people who prefer to read longer articles in print"</i>.<p>And that even before talking about protecting the nature from wasteful habits like this.<p>But sure, if you enjoy it, build a small print.css, removing everything unnecessary and making it readable in black&white. Just be aware of the medium change, and that a good design in the one medium won't necessary work in the other.
While I do think that doing throw-away prints of webpages is bit questionable, there is still some value in making webpage print out nicely. I think "printing" PDFs is one of the easiest robust ways of archiving web pages. It creates nice static self-contained local copy of the content, which is readable basically on any platform.<p>Another example would be e-readers (eg Kindle) which in ways are closer to print than web as a medium. They are not currently really equipped to handle web-pages well; Send to Kindle extension seems to do some sort of readability-like heuristic when formatting web-pages to be sent for Kindle. It would be kinda nice if print css would be good enough to work as-is on Kindle (etc).<p>Of course there is the question of the overall quality of current web-design. Many pages are just ridiculously busy to begin with, something that somehow becomes accentuated when printed out. Maybe designers should spend a moment after building a print layout reflecting if all that stuff that needed chopping away for print was actually necessary to have in the first place.
I personally don't care that much about most articles being printable, but if you're making any kind of material that is supposed to be studied, please, please make sure it's properly printable. Doing research / studying a topic is something that is still infinitely easier to do on paper IMHO.<p>Having said that, does anybody know a decent web-based app for researching stuff? What I definitively need is:<p>* Ability to have a collection of related articles in one place<p>* Simple list of bookmarks that link to a specific part of the text.<p>* Highlighting in different colors<p>* Adding comments to a page that are _easy_ to view. Preferably in a sidebar next to the page or something.<p>* Adding links to external sources interactively to the document<p>* The ability to write a summary of the article<p>I've searched before a few times, but I've never been able to find something that had all the above and, more importantly, properly integrated those features.
Unfortunately, printed media support in CSS still sucks.<p>I have a web app that needs to generate printable official documents, and it's really not possible to do a good job with CSS. I resort to generating PDF in Javascript, which is laborious and duplicates a lot of effort.<p>My biggest gripe is the inability to control the header and footer and the inability to sanely specify where page breaks are allowed.
The idea of printing a web page (particularly an article) does seem, in many ways, pointless. As others mentioned, it's a fundamentally different medium that strips out all of the things that make a web page compelling (linking, dynamicism, etc.)<p>On the other hand, there's clear value in stripping out the ephemera and detritus around a work in order to concentrate more centrally on the work itself. While the idea of "printable" becomes less and less tenable, the core idea of focusing on the work itself is still important. In some ways it seems a loss that these ideas have become conflated.
So recently I re-built the theme for Read the Docs which some of you more pythonic devs might be using. Despite having designed sites for nearly two-decades it was the first time I'd ever gotten a request to make sure there was some print rules in there. Makes sense with docs.<p>The funny bit of course is I didn't even know there was a specific print rule I could use. Took me about 10 minutes to fix.<p>Actually, looking at the design now I just noticed a bug. Off to my text editor!
I've heard of people printing whole articles and reading them in paper format before.<p>Personally, I would rather have a print.css that hides everything but a message that says "save the trees, don't print an article only to discard it after".<p>We do have some clients that ask for their website to be printable, but it's mostly clients that are in the legal or medical business. It doesn't come in regular contracts, the client has to ask for it.
The only thing that I usually bother to ensure really works when printed is receipt pages. I haven't even owned a printer in years, but printing receipts to PDF is something I do daily.<p>I'd suggest OP buy a Kindle, but on the other hand you probably need to go through quite a few reams of paper before you make up the environmental cost of even just the lithium-ion battery...
I feel like browser print support is like CSS support at the end of the last millennium: fragmented and not guaranteed to be decently supported if at all.<p>I wanted to make a print style for my CV and it just was a terrible pain to get things like per page header and footers.
Internet Explorer has by far the best print preview and printing engine. It hasn't changed since v4, nevertheless it is still better than any other browser.<p>One can zoom the page content, print only selected content, disable background pictures and color, print only main content (no menu bar), etc.<p>Interestingly enough, I tried out NCSA/Spyglass Mosaic v3 32-bit on Win7 and it already had almost the same print-preview features that are still available in IE (IE 1 emerged from Mosaic code base, IE up to v6 had "Mosaic" it in the copyright text in the about dialog).<p>Please browser vendors improve your print preview engine!
The poor letter-spacing, or more accurately kerning, is that either the fonts in use don't have kerning pairs or they're being ignored, as web browsers seem to do. Printing from another typeface would solve the former, but in my experience (and not thoughtful research), kerning pairs are ignored in every browser. Firefox does give an effort, though, with automatic optical kerning, but it often crashes letters together while leaving too much space between others. It would be interesting to know if that feature translated to print.
Unless printing the page is a useful and usable byproduct (which may be the case in certain SaaS scenarios), I wouldn't give a print stylesheet more than 15 minutes of my time.
We have a little tool that can produce a multi-column print view (based on paper size and orientation) from most web-based articles. Chrome doesn't support multi-column CSS in its print view yet, so it doesn't work there. If anyone's curious, there's a video here: <a href="http://blog.fivefilters.org/post/75603097111/pdf-newspaper-2-5" rel="nofollow">http://blog.fivefilters.org/post/75603097111/pdf-newspaper-2...</a>
Even if we all agreed to make sites printable you would never be happy with it. Right now certain CSS rules such as "float" can not be applied to print. This means you can not do any advanced layouts without totally redoing your HTML.<p>It is far more important to have a site mobile compatible than print compatible which again will probably cause some HTML refactoring. So more websites are going to worry about being mobile compatible and not waste their time on print.<p>The percentage of people who print a site is so negotiable, that like mcmillion said you would be better served supporting IE6. This combined with the fact that print versions can not match the screen version means you'll probably never see a site embrace your rallying cry.<p>Your best bet is to stop killing trees and get a Kindle Paper White or other e-reader with a web browser.
I couldn't disagree more with the author about appended URLs being a problem. A print stylesheet is <i>exactly</i> when you want URLs to be displayed in the text of the page, because there's no other way to find out where that underlined text is supposed to be pointing.
I don't find this post that useful. It goes through some sites, criticizing what they do wrong (what the hell does "anti-print" mean?), but offers no explicit examples of sites that get it all (or all-1) right. Kottke.org has colored links and sidebar (on a print out? those are useless). I'm not a designer, but I still like to create nice looking things. No points are given on what makes a nice printout, even though some of the examples given look completely fine to me.
There is a CSS/HTML rendering engine for print, PrinceXML <a href="http://www.princexml.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.princexml.com/</a> - it is extremely good quality. It is not open source, but does fill a niche gap. If you need to produce quality pdf output from a single source it could be worth looking at.<p>(its also interesting in that it is written in a functional logic programming language..., and that it is a small Australian startup)
I've used WeasyPrint combined with custom templates in some web apps to get the job done. Worth looking into if this is a key part of what you are building.
The point about “text is too big” is really, really strange—using 12pt in print is okay, but you should never use it for a screen—everyone's reading from the screen from a much bigger distance, and resolutions are getting higher and higher.
print.css = "Hi, I need you to continue to support this increasingly smaller edge case, to make this rapidly dwindling user base happy about something that should not, under any circumstances, be happening in 2014."<p>Supporting the printing of pages is inefficient and wasteful. It's the IE6 argument all over again. There are more meaningful ways of both storing and distributing information digitally.<p>Even for atacrawl's scenario - we should be building systems that make these types of documents easier to fill out digitally than on paper. I don't know about you guys, but when I have to fill out a paper form, I get frustrated because of the near-universal poor design.<p>Printing should be dead. Why are we keeping it on life support?
I do not understand the need to print out any webpage. The occasional form for a bank still requires faxing but that is usually a pdf anyways.<p>Also, what about the environmental cost? If we make it easier to print, will more people print? Whether we make it easier to print or not I suspect that as children are exposed to technology at a very young age there will be less of a need/want to print. When you have a tablet that you can take with you anywhere, what's the point?