[thelist] CSS image replacement and printing

Stephen Rider evolt_org at striderweb.com
Wed Jan 21 10:40:56 CST 2004


On Tuesday, January 20, 2004, at 02:02  PM, kris burford wrote:

> my take on it would be to think about the purposes of the visitor 
> printing your page. are they printing it to see the lovely graphics? 
> my guess would be not. i'd suggest that people print pages that have 
> worthy content and it's the words (and, possibly, key images) that 
> they wish to retain.
>
> personally, the option to have print style sheets... is all about 
> removing the graphical surrounds. which means that image replacement 
> and print style sheets can be perfect complimentary approaches.

This an advertising site for a real estate company, with specific pages 
for most of the individual buildings that have apartments for rent.  
So, yes, it would be nice if someone printing out the info page for a 
particular building got the nice looking company name and logo at the 
top of the page instead of a plaintext equivalent.

I do not see print style sheets as "all about removing the graphical 
surrounds" as you put it.  There are a lot of other uses.  On a 
different site I use print styles to rearrange the header a bit, remove 
navigation menus that are extraneous on the printed page but necessary 
on the site, and add the web address just below the street address, as 
well as swapping a white-on-black logo for a black-on-white logo that 
looks better when the rest of the page is printed black-on-white.  (The 
web site is white text on black background, while it prints black on 
white -- this last image swap is one of the things I'm having issues 
with regarding image replacement)

Original question:
> It seems to me that using [CSS image replacement techniques] would 
> cripple any pages that someone tries to print out, as most browsers 
> don't print backgrounds by default.  Of those that do print 
> backgrounds, some of those will, for example, scale the size of the 
> webpage to fit the paper page, but the background does not get scaled 
> -- which means the picture gets clipped.
>
> Does anyone have any techniques or ideas to avoid these issues?  Am I 
> overstating the problem?

Steve



More information about the thelist mailing list