Creating a Print Stylesheet

In this tutorial, Rachel Andrew shows you how to use Design-Time Stylesheets in Dreamweaver to make a print stylesheet for your pages - even if they use tables for layouts!
 
Despite the promised utopia of a paperless office, you are likely to find that users will print out your web pages for reference, or to read away from the computer.  As we know, what looks good on the web does not necessarily look good in print and if you site uses many graphics, the user is going to be using up much unnecessary printer ink in getting their copy, as your navigation buttons aren’t of much interest once the application is printed!
 
Many sites link to ‘printer friendly’ versions of their pages. What these versions usually are, is a separate version of the document, created either by hand (which means you have to maintain 2 versions of the document) or by a script, and the printable document will be formatted for print and contain no, or minimal graphics. While this method works well, you do have the additional development time of creating the new pages or writing the script to create the printable page, and you need to have a link on each page that launches this special version.
 
A print stylesheet gets around all of these problems. The print stylesheet comes into play when the user prints any document to which it is linked. You can define any element on your page differently in the print stylesheet and these are the styles that will be used when the document is printed. You can use the print stylesheet to hide areas of the page, such as navigation, graphics-intensive headers or unnecessary pictures; you can change the font styles, colors and sizes in order that the page is readable when printed; you can ensure that the contrast between colors works well even if the document is printed in black and white, and you can even add to the document areas that will only display on printing – such as page related information, to make it obvious where the document came from.
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Overview

Table of Content:

  • Getting Started
  • Using Design-time Stylesheets while creating a stylesheet
    • Adding the Design Time Stylesheet
  • Printing only relevant areas of the page
    • Making content stretch to fill the page
  • Using a different font style for print
  • Converting to grayscale
  • Display page information on printed versions
  • Attach the stylesheet to the document
  • Summary

Rachel Andrew

Rachel AndrewRachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.

Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.

As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:

Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272

Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.

In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.

See All Postings From Rachel Andrew >>

Reviews

This is says that it is for Dreamweaver 4

February 20, 2004 by Nick Gray

Hi,

I purchased this tutorial and it looks excellent, just what I wanted. However the first action is to add the design time stylesheet. I've got Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 and can't find this option, when I right click on the CSS- Styles Panel it's not there as suggested. Is this me being stupid or does this tutorial not cover Dreamweaver 4 as suggested on DMXZone

Cheers

Nick

Worked Beautifully!!

February 2, 2006 by Kristi Richard
Thanks for this great article on setting up the CSS for printing. It saved me hours of work! Kristi

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