Print Stylesheet: The Definitive Guide

Introduction

A print stylesheet formats a web page so that, when printed, it automatically prints in a user-friendly format. Print stylesheets have been around for a number of years and have been written about a lot. Yet so few websites implement them, meaning that we're left with web pages that frustratingly don't print properly onto paper. It's remarkable that so few websites use print stylesheets, as:

• Print stylesheets enormously improve usability, especially for pages with a lot of content (such as this one!)
• They're phenomenally quick and easy to set up

Some websites do offer a link to a print-friendly version of the page, but this of course needs to be set up and maintained. It also requires that users notice this link on the screen and then use it ahead of the regular way they print pages, e.g. by selecting the print button at the top of the screen. Print-friendly versions are, however, useful when printing a number of web pages at the same time, such as an article that spans onto several webpages.

How to Set Up Your Print Stylesheet

A print stylesheet works in much the same way as a regular stylesheet, except that it only gets called up when the page is printed. To make it work, the following needs to be inserted into the top of every web page:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

The file print.css is the print stylesheet and the media="print" command means that this CSS file only gets called up when web pages are printed. There are many different media you can use for stylesheets, such as for handheld, TV, projection etc. See this full list of media types for more.

What to Put in Your Print Stylesheet

The CSS commands in the print stylesheet essentially override the CSS commands in the main stylesheet. As such, the only commands you need to put into the print stylesheet are the ones to override the CSS commands in the main stylesheet. This means that you don't need to repeat any colour or branding CSS commands, as they'll already be taken from the main stylesheet. Generally speaking, you'll want your print stylesheet to make the following happen when users hit that print button:

Remove Unwanted Items

Usually it's just your organisation logo and page content that you'll want to appear on the printed version of the web page. You'll normally want to remove the header, left column and right column. You may also want to remove the footer (or some of it) from the printed version, unless it contains your contact details. There may be certain isolated items you'd prefer weren't printed; you can simply assign these class="noprint" in the HTML. To get rid of these items along with the header and navigation (assuming these are assigned <div id="header"> and <div id="nav">), use the display: none command:

#header, #nav, .noprint {display: none;}

You may also want to remove certain images and adverts, especially animated images, as these won't make sense when printed.

Format the Page

There's nothing worse than printing off a web page to find the last few words of each line cut off. It's also annoying (and a waste of paper) when the left and right columns are left in, leaving a very narrow space for the content so that the web page prints onto 15 pieces of paper. Generally speaking, the three CSS commands you'll need are:

width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;

These commands should be applied to any containing elements (<div>s for a CSS layout and <table>s for table layouts) to ensure the content spans the full width of the paper. So, the full CSS command would perhaps be something like:

#container, #container2, #content {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;}

Change the Font?

Some print stylesheets do change the font size (often to 12pt), but this isn't generally a very good idea. If users increase text size on the screen, then the text will print in this larger font size... unless you specify a fixed font size in the print stylesheet.

Other print stylesheets change the font family to a serif font (such as Times New Roman), as this is slightly easier to read from print. Whether you choose to do this or not is up to you, as users may be a bit surprised to see a different font printed out.

Do also bear in mind that background images and colours don't print out by default. As such, you may wish to change the colour of text in a light colour so that it has a reasonable colour contrast without its background.

Links

Printouts are often in black and white. Thus, make sure that links have a decent colour contrast. If not, assign links a slightly darker colour in the printout. For example:

a:link, a:visited {color: #781351}

For bonus usability, you could include a footnote on the page listing all the URLs from that page, with each link referencing its URL underneath with a number. It's otherwise impossible to know where a link is pointing to when reading a printout from a web page. See this working example and/or find out how to do this by reading the article, Improving Link Display for Print.

Making the Print Stylesheet

When making the print stylesheet, place the print CSS commands into the bottom of your main CSS file. As you keep adding more commands, check how your web pages look on the computer screen (don't do this on a live website!). Keep adding commands until you're happy with the appearance. Then cut these commands out of the main CSS file and paste them into the print stylesheet. To summarise, your print stylesheet may look similar to this:

/* Remove unwanted elements */
#header, #nav, .noprint
{
    display: none;
}

/* Ensure the content spans the full width */
#container, #container2, #content
{
    width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;
}

/* Change text colour to black 
    (useful for light text on a dark background) */
.lighttext
{
    color: #000
}

/* Improve colour contrast of links */
a:link, a:visited
{
    color: #781351
}

You've now got a print stylesheet! For something this quick and easy to set up that improves usability as much as it does, you'd be mad not to use one!

History

• 12 April, 2007 -- Original version posted
• 25 May, 2007 -- Article moved