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Problems with print media style
My redesign continues as I merge some of the very detailed usability suggestions given to me by Greg Lowney.
In the process of exploring these issues, he discovered some major problems with the way Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer handle printed media stylesheets. His argument was that sometimes users want to print the page out just exactly like it appears on the screen and the aforementioned browsers won't let them have that choice.
Under the current implementations:
- If you want print the page out just exactly as it appears on the screen, you forced to take a screenshot with the PRNT SCRN key and then print out the captured image from an image editor.
- You are not given any choice to select different print stylesheets. You have to accept the author's decisions. There really is no way to fix this without confusing other users with older browsers that don't support stylesheets.
Perhaps I should file this as a bug with the various browser makers and raise the issue with W3C. Also we discovered some strange rending bugs in Firefox's print preview function that mysteriously go away when the page is actually printed--another bug to file.
Posted by Pace Arko on August 24, 2005 7:00 PM