CSS Design Tip: A Time to Print
Using CSS to provide a printer-friendly document
One of the basic concepts in web design is making things simple and user friendly. As a designer, I’m always looking for new and innovative ways to serve information to my client’s audience. A simple principle to understand, but not always simple to execute, is producing a printer-friendly version of your website content. The need for printer-friendly web pages is especially necessary if your audience wants to print coupons, articles, receipts, recipes or even itineraries. By simply pushing the print button your audience can be at the mercy of how their printer handles the web page or simply just how the web page is built. This can produce pages with small amounts of information per page and large amounts of pages being wasted.
So how do we solve this problem?
Well, we can establish a “click here for printer friendly version”, but this means someone has to write a script that creates a version or create the version themselves. Not extremely difficult, but it is unnecessary work if you simply know how to structure a good CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) document. (Not to mention that you can end up with duplicate content on your website which should be avoided for search engine optimization.) CSS is a style sheet language to help website creators format content and visual design.

CSS has the ability to use different style sheets for different media types. Simply put, we can see different versions of your web site for different media. If someone uses a handheld device, a TV, or printer, CSS initializes a specific style format for each one.
How does this help us?
With the use of a print specific style sheet we can clear away all the formatting that benefits the visual medium of the web but may hinder production of a printed document. You can read about and see this function in use at A List Apart ( www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint) by just pushing CTRL +P (PC) or CMD +P (MAC). Learn how to put your own print style sheet in action at meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/200001.html.
-By Raul Sinclair, Web Designer


