Easy printer friendly pages
Ever want your readers to be able to print your pages cleanly without having to suffer through all your sidebars and graphics? Here's a way to do just that. You need to create a new stylesheet and point your pages to it. Here's how I did it:
First, you need to define the two stylesheets in your document's HEAD:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<$MTBlogURL$>print.css" media="print" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<$MTBlogURL$>styles-site.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
Your print.css stylesheet should not contain any extraneous items, such as banners or sidebars. Your readers will probably only want to print your posts. Therefore, any element that should not be printed should be dealt with as follows:
.element-name {
display: none;
}
You must define the original stylesheet as media="screen" and the print.css stylesheet as media="print" so that when your page is viewed on the Web, the browser will serve up the screen-based stylesheet. But when the browser's Print or Print Preview button is pressed, the browser will use the print.css stylesheet.
If you have a separate division for your copyright information, as I do, it might be a good idea to leave that in the print stylesheet as well.
There is one "gotcha" involved in printing, and it doesn't matter whether there's a special stylesheet for printing or not. When you are printing pages, such as MT blog pages, that have the "More" (extended text) link (like the "But wait! There's more!" link on these pages), the text in that link is not going to print. If you want the extended text to print, you'll need to go to the individual archive page and expand the link and then print the page(s).
Guest authored by:
Joni Mueller - jonielectric.com
May 17th, 2003 at 10:47 am
I've posted this on mine now - its something i've been meaning to do and just not got round to it. What would you do if you *did* want to print the entire page though?
May 17th, 2003 at 2:25 pm
Then you would want to be sure that ALL the elements are included; but then, you really wouldn't need a separate stylesheet. I am unaware of a way to selectively do this. When I print a blog entry from the web, I'm usually only interested in that particular post. Note also, that if you print from the individual archive and comments are displayed (rather than in a separate pop-up link as mine are), then of course you get the comments also.