Ease the Pain with IE6 Printing
Before we start let me shortly introduce Adrian Bateman. He is the developer
currently working on our IE7 print experience. Since he works out of Microsoft's
offices in Reading, England, we are much better now at printing “tomatoes”.
Without further ado:
Today, there is a well known problem with
printing from Internet Explorer where the layout of the page sometimes
causes content to be cropped if it doesn't fit into the width of the paper.
We are working hard to improve printing in IE7 but we'd like to share some
approaches to ease the pain when printing with IE today.
First of all, content authors creating web
pages can change the layout of their pages when printing using the
CSS
@media rule.
This allows you to specify CSS attributes that get applied based on whether
the page is displayed on screen or printed to paper. You might, for example,
choose to turn off menus, logos, and side content by setting the appropriate
areas to display: none when printing.
Example:
@media print {
#menu, #logo, #sidebar {display: none; }
}
If you want to print web pages from someone
else's site then you have a few options. Using the built in functionality,
you may be able to adjust the size of the margins used when printing to make
the content fit. You can do this by picking File, Page Setup from the menu
or using the Page Setup button from within Print Preview. Many people set
their page orientation to landscape when printing wider pages and in this
aspect ratio, most pages will print correctly. Remember that Print Preview
will give you an accurate indication of what will be printed and allow you
to see if the page will be cropped.
Often, you only really want to print part of a
page. You don't need the adverts, navigation, and layout. If you select part
of a page, you can right-click and choose Print and then choose the Page Range
radio button for "Selection". This will print just the area of the page
you've selected.
If you want to take the hassle out of printing
or if the suggestions above don't work on the pages you need to print, there
are several Internet Explorer add-ons that help:
As I indicated, printing and the print preview
experience are amongst the areas we are improving in IE7. Our goal is to be
able to print most web pages without losing any content using the default
settings. For pages where this is impractical, we want to provide you with
simple controls within print preview so that you can quickly and easily
adjust the settings needed to print the way you want. We're still finalizing
the details of the new functionality for printing but I will post an update
once we get it locked down.
-- Adrian Bateman and Markus Mielke
