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Web Toolkit
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Printer Friendliness
Some of your site visitors will want to print your pages. Design each page to read well and fit on standard-size paper.
Number One Goal:
- Make all html pages printer-friendly.
Number Two Goal:
- If you can't meet Number One Goal, determine what content will likely be printed by users and focus on making those pages printer-friendly
- If possible, maintain a single source for both viewing and printing
versions:
- You can use cgi scripting to accomplish this. But if your site is hosted in an Athena locker, scripting is not available to you.
- You can generate friendly pages at printing time through smart use of a Cascading Style Sheet.
Tips to create a printer-friendly html page:
- Limit the length of tables; break them up where possible. Tables influence page breaks.
- Make sure graphics dimensions don't exceed the "printable area" (conservatively set at 535 pixels).
- Don't use a background graphic or other unnecessary graphics
- Create an unbroken page of related content.
- Don't use light-colored text.
- Spell out hyperlink urls and email addresses as appropriate.
- Include the page url somewhere on your page so that hard-copy users can revisit the page if they so choose.
