Our friend, Mr. Printer

[fuccaro]

A lot of tutorials and other documents are offered on the Web for download. Some web designers also offer a “printer friendly” version. The name explains it self what is it about: saving ink and paper. However, are there some rules to keep in mind when creating the printer friendly version of a Web page?

[Flores]

From what I have seen, a printer-friendly version usually saves ink because it is just the document itself. Sometimes when printing the regular page, you will also print all of the different logos, images, links, etc, whereas a printer-friendly version will not have 20 different images, 30 links, etc.

Flores

[hyposmurf]

I think we've all at some stage printed something and found a huge background colour printed out too :) !I'm sure as Flores suggested,the images backgrounds are not incorporated just the basic text the user would require.

[CADTutor]

Printer friendly pages should have no background images and may have other images removed (such as headers and footers). Also, the font may be changed for one that reads better when printed. Also, long documents (like the CADTutor tutorials) can have page breaks inserted.

All of this is usually done with cascading style sheets. The basic HTML page is the same file but a different style sheet is used for printing.