printing

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printing is a method of creating something offline from something online.

Printing websites

Many websites don't consider making their content printer-friendly, which can be useful for archival reasons. It can also help people who might be less technical and would want paper overviews of data [1].

See printed website for more.

Styling prints with CSS

Add a stylesheet for print screen only

Add this to the <header> section of your site:

   <style type="text/css" media="print">[CSS goes here]</style>

Use an easy to read and/or easy to print font

Monospace can prevent confusing 0-s with O-s, l-s with 1-s, and so on.

   html {
       font-family: monospace;
       font-size: 9pt;
       line-height: 1.2em;
   }

Display URLs of hyperlinks

   a, a:visited, a:link {
       color: #000;
       text-decoration:underline;
   }

   a:after {
       content: "(" attr(href) ")";
       display: inline-block;
       width: auto;
       text-decoration: none;
       margin-left: 0.3em;
       font-style:italic;
   }

Hide all elements not needed for a print

Decorative images, those which are not part of the content, should not be printed to prevent waste.

   .element {
       display: none;
       visibility: hidden;
   }

Avoid low contrast and colours

While these may look stylish, they are hard to read and some printing methods do not support printing colours at all.