On 6/7/07, Lucien Stals <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all, I'd written a print style sheet for a site I'd done ( http://www.swin.edu.au/ads/ltshowcase/inspire/presentations.html ), but the feedback I got was that nobody knew it was there (unless they printed the page). So I hit google for some suggestions on how best to do this. This has lead to more confusion. One site I read suggested that print style sheets can confuse users when what comes out of the printer differs significantly from what they saw on the page. This is true in my case where I hide the navigation and some background images. I also change the font and justification to better suit print. So do people here think it's a good idea to have a print style sheet that differs from the screen style sheet?
Yes!
In the end, I used some javascript to allow users to switch between two style sheets on the screen. One is designed for the screen, the other designed for print. This way, if they print the page, they get what they see. What do people think about this approach. (If you are unclear from my description about how this works, just visit the page and toggle the "print friendly view" link near the top of the page).
I definitely think it is important to let users know that the result from printing the page will be different than what they see on screen, only because a lot of users are used to wasting all their ink printing web pages that do not have print stylesheets, and think this is the norm. Whether it's a matter of explaining the feature to users or showing it on-screen, it helps the users who don't know about it.
My approach has caused me a further problem: Because I used a link to trigger the script, clicks get added to the browsers history, when technically the user hasn't left the page. Any suggestions for how to get around this? Should I have used a select list?
Isn't this problem solved by putting "return false;" in the event handler? Or am I missing something? -- -- Christian Montoya christianmontoya.net .. designtocss.com ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
