Author:Karl Regis Topic:CSS Viewed: 80 time(s) [ Not Rated Yet ]
The power of print + CSS So you've made yourself a cutting edge
web page. What next ? Well maybe you want your visitors to be
able to print pages in a certain style. Heavy graphical content
can be removed, background colour changed and navigation items
removed, infact anything to make a printer friendly version of
your page. All this can de done with CSS.
Printer friendly pages with CSS CSS can effectively be used to
create formated documents ready for print. This is quite a
simple process and all we have to do is create and attach a
second style sheet with the attributes required for our print
output. Therefore we have a stylesheet that controlls what you
see on the screen and a style sheet that controls what is
printer. Easy......
Markup changes So, we will have already attached an external
stylesheet in the head code of our document. It should look
something like this:
/>
The tag here has an attribute called media which can have
a variety of options such as screen or print. For a full
description of media types please view our glossary here.
Now, if we want to separate our media into two types - one for
the screen and one for print we must alter our code:
media="screen" />
media="print"/>
We have now defined a separate style sheet for both screen and
print.
The css sheets are now called screen.css and print.css. This
means when a web browser requests your web page screen.css kicks
in for your screen display. When a request is made for a print
preview or print the style is defined by print.css.
This is not an automatic process and we will have to write a new
style sheet called print.css that works in accordance with your
original html document.
In the next section we look at the CSS involved in setting up a
page for print output.
CSS Changes Lets now take a close look at the simple changes we
need to make in our stylesheet and how we can create an
individual print sheet.
Now is the time to define exactly what we want to achieve in our
print output. Maybe we want our website header and logo to be
appear on screen but be omitted on paper.
The easiest way to achieve this is create a class or id called
'header' and define a different style for screen.css and
print.css.
The CSS code for screen.css defines font, margin, font size,
font weight, background colour and border colour.
The CSS code for print.css defines only the font, font size and
font weight. To save the visitor ink we have omitted the
background and border and reduces the font size.
If your site is heavy on animated banners or flash movies we can
apply a similar technique to allow the banners to be shown on
the screen only.
Typical markup for you advertisment movies could be like this:
Your screen.css stylesheet could contain all kinds of attributes
for the advertisment such as border colour, drop shadows and
position.
In your print.css stylesheet you would want to omit the
advertisement from printing so in you would place the following:
#div.ads { display:none; }
This CSS code will illiminate the advertisement from the print
output.
Hope this helps:
http://www.css-help.com
About the author:
Karl Regis is a student studying Computer Science. He is
continually developing a css tutorial website in order to gain a
better understanding of cascading style sheets and pass this
knowledge on to others.
Css Help is found here:
http://www.css-help.com
We welcome css tutorial submissions, css experiments and helpful
advice.
