Using CSS2 to Create Printer Friendly Pages

If you’ve been thinking about adding printer friendly pages to your information web site, Jennifer Kyrnin has the solution for you. “There are several options:

1. Make a copy of every page or article - and manually remove all the non-printer-friendly stuff.
2. Use a (CGI, PHP, JavaScript, other) script to remove the non-printer friendly stuff on the fly.
3. Write a style sheet for print.

The drawback to option one should be fairly obvious to most people. It is very labor intensive and requires that for every page on your site, you create a second, duplicate page.

Option two is the most common choice right now, because it mitigates the problems of option one, and with a small change in how you write your Web pages, you can set it up for every page on your site. But if you don’t have access to CGI or you just don’t feel comfortable with programming, this method can be challenging, if not impossible.

Cascading Style Sheets to the Rescue

Luckily, CSS was not written with just Web pages in mind, and with just a few extra codes you can create a printer style sheet that removes all the non-friendly options on your page and even takes into account issues such as typography and readability. And you don’t have to write two different copies of your page or do any programming to build it.”

Read the full article hosted by About.com .