HTML & CSS Direct Study

Printer Friendly Layouts

Often times web pages can be printed in order to make the content mobile and accessible by readers. Information such as emails, directions, research, articles, and much other important information is desired in a print format. It is because of this that we should make sure that our web pages and their layouts are printer friendly. This can be accomplished by having an additional style sheet that modifies the page to make it printer friendly. Attributes such as:

----Font

----Color

----Images

----Links

----Visual Layouts

Best Practices for Creating Printer Friendly Pages:

• Remove any backgrounds on the page. This allows for the page to be printed on a white page, saving ink and time.
• Text should be black or a color that will print well. All text should be the same color. Black is preferred because it will print on both color and black only printers.
• Ensure that the text on your page can be read. Adjust the font size according to what is most visible.
• When your page is printed users cannot visit links, therefore the formatting should change. You may want to leave the underline so that readers can tell there was link there.
• Remove non essential elements such as navigation, excessive pictures, advertisements, and buttons. Content is the most important thing to display when printing a page.
• Make sure that your layout fits well on a page, because printer paper is normally 8 ½ by 11 some horizontal layouts may need to be changes to fit better vertically within the page sizes.