October 6, 2009 at 5:29 pm

Printing with CSS techniques

Moving through the whole print.css file, there are even more elements, classes, and IDs that are hidden. This demonstrates how this technique is in fact an exercise in removing as much as possible. The above rules hide the global navigation as well as the branding, white-on-color logo, and the right and left columns. This essentially leaves the middle content and the footer, as well as the logo that is usually hidden at the bottom, at least on screen.

With this technique, there are a few more rules required for the printer CSS than with printing techniques that share the screen and print rules. The reason is that authors will need to set the fonts and colors for all type styles from scratch once again, since not a single rule from the screen.css file is applied to the print version.

However, starting with a clean slate these days is typically more reliable for print CSS, since browser support is inconsistent and poorly documented.

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