Websites Should Be Printable (brennenputh.me)

The one counter argument to this that I would accept is that users don't know about font settings. But the proper solution if for browsers to make it easier those settings rather than every single website having to add font controls.

The only exception is that the layout of your website requires multiple columns so increasing either font size or page zoom doesn’t work well. For example gcc.gnu.org is challenging for a mobile browser if one prefers larger font sizes. You are fine if you aren’t doing that.

Did you use

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Drawing a line can be hard, but clearly the basic font should be contrast-y enough so that most people can read it, no? The user can control the defaults of many things on their devices, but we shouldn't require them to change settings to have a good experience. We already customize websites a lot.

I think it depends on the goals of the print version, but people spend a lot of time picking fonts and styles so things look good on a screen. I take this as saying you should supply the same type of attention to your print style sheet.

For some reason, the print command works much better in the Vivaldi browser. It frequently renders correctly pages that are garbled by Firefox and Chrome. Moreover, its print command also works many times faster. Thus even if I usually browse with Firefox, when I want to save a page I frequently reopen it in Vivaldi, in order to print it from there. Unfortunately, not even Vivaldi does it always perfectly.

It is very annoying that the print command does not work in browsers, because nowadays that is the only reliable way to save a Web page. Saving a page with the "Save" command rarely works, especially when attempting to read the saved page offline, because too many pages rely on scripts to generate the displayed content, and those frequently do not work offline or even just inside local files.

I do a lot of teaching, and for many reasons share PDFs of articles in addition to the web pages and URLs. I know how to work around these things, but lots of reasons to print and article and what are normal folks supposed to do? Hell, sometimes I don't even notice until the cut is buried in the middle of the long document...

If you click through them, you will often notice that they are squeezed into the most inconvenient popups, modal dialogs, and other interstitial windows that are abused for this purpose. They are also insufferably long-winded.

I often try to capture the text of these so-called "legal agreements". I try to shove them into a "Print to PDF" but that fails. So I try to copy-paste them into Google Keep, but that also fails, because Keep has a limit. So then I try to cram them into Google Docs. And it often takes about 15 sweeps with copy/paste and scroll scroll scroll, in order to meaningfully transfer all the content into Docs.

It may come in handy later; for example they will often include some contact information for their privacy or legal department, and sometimes there are opt-out instructions nestled near the end of the Terms of Service. They may also document the steps of a grievance process. If you, as a customer, do not follow their steps for filing a grievance and pursue it according to their policy, they have no obligation to help you. So, if you are a serious user of any service, or it means serious money to you, I encourage you to paste or print those legal Terms by any means necessary.

Of course, they will invariably change the Terms on a whim and with the slightest notice to you, and the game begins all over again. Strange game. Perhaps the smartest move is not to play?

So I don’t think there’s much merit arguing about what doesn’t exist any longer.

This kind of fairly idealistic thinking is so far from the ordinary web development norm that you have to go past "supporting that version of IE with 0.7% market share" to get to it.

I politely disagree, the problem is we have made websites a javascript hellscape with all that original intent broken by design.

And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.

A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.

But to expect every author also upload a PDF? I mean, TeX is great for what it is, but there's a reason _the web_ adapted print stylesheets.

Even if (La)TeX (or Typst, or Postscript or anything else) were easy to learn, you're left with maintaining 2 copies or a compilation system which is also a challenge.

For one, it often entirely heads off the requirement for "can we have it so the user can download a PDF of this?" (because users generally know how to print things!)

And for another, it broadens your options for implementing those PDFs if that requirement doesn't go away. You may not have to restrict your markup to that which some PDF generator library can work with, because printing any page in a headless browser is easier.

You often don't have to do much in a CSS stylesheet to get a modern site to render well, because we've moved away from so many layout hacks in general.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Page...

I also feel like there's no point in making a CV in HTML for my website, if I'm going to re-make it in PDF for all the old school application processes out there.

My solution was simply to keep the online CV as simple as possible, so it still looked good in PDF. But it's far from perfect.

I mostly do this with order confirmation pages when I order off of random e-commerce sites, and with my bank when I use online bill pay. (And then if someone claims I didn't pay them, I go back through the pdfs and see if I made a mistake.)

More importantly, I "print to pdf" recipes that I want to save. Every year I print out the same turkey recipe, from a pdf, and then I don't need to worry about getting my phone or computer gross by interacting with it while I prep the turkey.

Or do you mean even exporting is a waste of resources?

Cuts well on procrastination.

But website printing in general, I see less of a need.

We had just completed yet another other redesign and our (React) pages printed completely mangled and users hated it. We regularly got feedback about it.

And yet it was so low priority that me (UX designer) and a developer had to team up and get off the record permission to spend a few days fixing it in CSS alone while our managers covered for us.

When people for whom $29,000 is an enormous expense are purchasing a car, you can bet they are printing stuff and very, very carefully considering their purchase. Primary demographic was not young, tech native people.

For a couple of applications I have built recently, an offline view of the data in print form has been part of the design requirement. It's still reasonably common in situations where people will meet in real life and a physical clipboard will be needed with a register or some physical signatures are needed, or in situations where paper goes home with people from meetings for them to read and sign. So, lots of school/community/disclaimer tasks where you can't presume people have devices (or a device wouldn't be usable/practical/useful, especially in outdoor contexts).

These days PDFs are also useful for marking up in some devices.

For my own work, making an app printable is a basic thing I always do — it's part of the normal process.

But that often means little more than disabling headers/footers/sidebars, rendering simple text where a logo was, putting in page break guidance at sensible points, perhaps overriding a few text colours, maybe a couple of media queries for items that need to only appear/not appear in print. Basic stuff. From there, most "print this" views are little more than a slightly simpler template.

The cool thing about is that printability often comes up late in the requirements, and it's a thing people try before they ask you about it — they try to print from the demo. So it's an easy positive surprise if the print view does more or less what the user would hope for, right from the beginning.

Making it so all of an interface is at least basically printable is actually easy if you plan for it, and it's a good way of keeping focussed on broader usability.

Generally speaking, if you are in any group situation where you meet in person and want to share something, paper is still king. Easiest to share and no distracting electronic devices.

Also for learning I often prefer physical books and printed out worksheets. It helps engage the spatial memory plus you can write on them with an actual pen which also helps recall compared to typing.