Jay White of DumbLittleMan.com writes - “Have you found a good way to allow readers to print individual post content without all of the sidebars, ads and headings messing up the print format?”
Extra stuff like logos, forms, navigation links, advertising, blogrolls, flash widgets, etc may look good when your blog page is viewed inside the web browser but these elements are almost useless for people who want to print out web pages on paper.
How to Create Printer Friendly Web Pages with a Print Style Sheet
With little effort, you can turn your blog into a printer friendly and environment friendly website (since readers will consume less ink and paper when printing your articles).
Step 1: Create a new CSS File (print.css) and add the following lines:
body {font-family: arial,helvetica,sans; font-size: 13px; background:fff; color:000;}
// Black Text on White Background
a,a:visited,a:link {color:#000; text-decoration:none}
// Do no underline links
.noprint {display:none} // This will do the magic
Step 2: Open the HTML source of your main blog template and enclose everything other than the content (like the sidebars, ad blocks, header logo, footers, etc) inside the following <span> tag
<span class=”noprint”> ….. </span>
You are instructing the browser not to print anything that appears inside the above tag.
Step 3: Add the following line inside the <HEAD> tag of your blog template
<link rel=”stylesheet” media=”handheld,print” href=”print.css” />
That’s it. To see how this works, click here and go to File->Print Preview.
This technique is not just effective for printed version of your web pages but even for PDFs - if someone prints your blog as a PDF document, they’ll see a clean version of the article without the extra bells-n-whistles. See - “Print to PDF Button for Blogs“
Previous: How to Enable Printer Friendly Blog Pages
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/create-printer-friendly-blog-css-trick/2109/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Very nice tip indeed and it arrived at a point when I needed it really :) Thanks.
Written by Debashish on 01.18.08
Astonishingly, your blog does not have a separate print view!
Written by anonymous on 01.18.08
Good tip.
Written by Veerasundar on 01.18.08
Thanks for ur great explanation. This is really something great for me as i m also a blogger as well as a reader
Written by Vineet on 01.18.08
Thanks - Just learning css. Will try to adopt the code…
Written by Michael on 01.18.08
Ha ha ha ha… lol… Look like a CSS class is going on…
It’s a tip for small kids.
Written by Chanky on 01.19.08
Thanks for the tip. Separating CSS for screen and print is a very useful feature. A lot of web dev teams should apply this feature to make websites more friendly for printers.
Written by Nascar on 01.20.08
Good CSS class by you..Amit :)..Thanks for sharing
Written by Manpreet Singh on 01.20.08
Excellent! This will definitely help alot for creating user friendly blogs.
Written by Mr. Quotes on 01.21.08
you are a genius! why? because what you are creating is not rocket-science, just using the basic stuff to create things that are so useful
keep up :)
Written by Gopal Aggarwal on 03.03.08