I have received many emails telling me that I really ought to make ongoing easier to print. Given that I write probably the second-longest entries in the whole universe of blogdom (trailing only Chris Brumme) I thought my correspondents had a point. Through the magic of CSS, this ought to be easy to achieve. However, it has so far more or less entirely defeated me so far. This is an appeal to the CSS mavens out there; I know one or two of them are among my readers. After they get it working, I shall offer some payback in the form of a don’t-be-a-moron-like me tutorial so you too can make your deathless prose more printable.
See, over there at the left, there’s a link labeled ”Print“ under the Serif and Sans-Serif links? Give it a whack and if you can figure out how to make what you see show up on the printer, let me know and I’ll praise you to the skies here.
Broken Technology and Grammar ·
So, silly me, I thought I could just do another stylesheet with
media='print' and that would take care of it.
Wrong. This didn’t work because while some of the things I put in the new
stylesheet showed up, so did all the stuff from the other stylesheet.
I guess because it had media='all'.
So I changed all the stylesheets except for the print version to
media='screen' but this seemed to produce different effects in
each browser I tried it in, and none were that hot.
I think these poor results are evidence of intervention by Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Poetry, hurling thunderbolts at the degenerates who would use the word “media” where basic grammatical sanity requires “medium.”
Keep it Simple, Stupid ·
OK, so I took the approach of simply making my print
stylesheet another alternative that you can select, then when you hit
control-P or command-P or whatever, everything should be hunky dory because
these are GUIs, right, and they offer What You See Is What You Get?
Hah, a cruel joke.
When I print from Mozilla, it does some of the things I ask, but refuses to
print my headline in white on Oriental-Carpet background the way you’re
looking it, even though approximately everyone now has a colour printer.
Internet Explorer, on the other hand, genially ignores all the CSS
and prints the naked unadorned HTML, which at least results in the the text
expanding to fill the whole width of the page.
I have now invested several hours of wrangling with this, and am getting increasingly irritated. I now suspect that CSS stands for “contorted style sheets.” Yes, dammit, I have validated the CSS. Advice is humbly and eagerly sought.
