Greener Printing on the Small Scale

Technology
11/23
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6 Responses to “Greener Printing on the Small Scale”

  1. Steve Avery

    Nice article. I must say though that I have been doing this for the last few years on sites that I have built. A couple of techniques I have recently thought of to also add improvement to Print style sheets are:

    1. Links in paragraphs of text. They stand out as the browser default links. Blue underline, for example. So my fix would be to set in the print css all links to colour black with an underline of none so that links will now look part of the paragraph of text.

    2. Links that say “Find out more” or “Read more” These links are whats known as a call to action. Telling the user to click in order to find out further information. Totally redundant for a Print Style sheet so what I tend to have is either a default class in my print CSS thats called “doNotPrint” and I apply that to these kind of links that I don’t want to print or target the specific link in the css style sheet, which will/could increase the number of declarations in the print css but reduce the number of classes used in your mark up.

    Hope that makes sense. :)

  2. Jordan Payne

    Good idea’s, I’ve never used a print only stylesheet before but it seems like a good idea and really isn’t that much extra effort.

    Might see what i can do in some free time :)

    Good article!

  3. Zinni

    Steve,

    I just came up with pretty much the same idea as you today while working on a print style sheet for a client. I also added a class “noprint” to items within the content managed portion of the site that I didn’t want to print. Great tip, and thanks for sharing it…

  4. Reggie

    My best implementation so far has been:

    1) using background images as primary decor - these don’t normally print
    2) where images are actually in the xhtml code I use a span element with “noPrint” assigned as a class and additional text included as “printOnly” class if the image has is relevant to the printed page.
    3) Also where text is likely to be printed out by the user (in a schedule, for example) I give them a “print page” link that evokes the print only style sheet. It only prints the company logo, copyright and contact information, and exactly the text they requested. The reason this works is the snippits of data on this website are .php includes files. Printing only what is requested is a breeze this way!

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