Improve Blogs With Print Style Sheets

Guys, for the love of… please, add print style sheets to your blogs. Whenever I come across an interesting post or article, and I know I will need to refer to it again, I print it and file with similar articles. To help those of us who’d rather read on paper than ruin eyesight reading from the screen, all you need to do it set up a style sheet for the print media. If you blog for the sake of sharing knowledge, you owe it to us.

It’s Simple, Really!

A while ago I wrote an article and explained how to do it in simple terms. Certain things make no sense on a sheet of paper, such as horizontal and vertical navigation, flashy ads and banners, and other "click here" things, as well as colors, so you need to hide them for the print media.

It’s easy enough to see what your site looks like when printed. Simply select Print Preview in your browser and see for yourselves. Check it in various browsers because each has it’s own corks.

Text Width

Some sites run content the full width of the page. I find them difficult to read, and I’ve seen studies about optimal width of on-screen text, which suggest the same. Making text scalable so it stretches to accommodate poor eyesight—yes, that’s the right thing to do. But to run text all the way across the screen in tiny font is plain wrong. I read tons of documentation, and if I read it all from screen, I’d be blind by now.

To make matters worse some sites hardcode the width of content area to something ridiculously wide, so even if you attempt to print, the text doesn’t reflow and gets chopped. A good example is the Microsoft Support site. Often times you print a KB article just to find out the printer ate word endings. Printing in landscape orientation kind of solves it, but please make sure your content is not clipped when previewed for printing.

A word about ads. Please, I strongly urge you, leave them out of print. Let online advertising remain online advertising. I saw the ad, thank you. If you make me stare at it when printed, I’ll first cut it out with AdBlock anyway.