1 More rooom on the left

After printing out, I would like to put it in binders. However, there is too few room on the left to punch without hitting characters. The margin on the right would be ok.

posted at 02:20 am on September 20, 2005 by Michael Hartmann

2 Unnecessary Whitespace?

Only skimmed the article (print style sheets are so individual, aren’t they), but noticed a little detail in the “a[href]:after” rule: ‘content: ” (” attr(href) “) ”;’ seems to include unnecessary whitespace behind the closing parenthese. Especially before any punctuation, this might be disturbing: “Foo (http://example.org/) .”, instead of “Foo (http://example.org/).”.

posted at 04:26 am on September 20, 2005 by Jens Meiert

3 Great article

Print style CSS is something that I have been looking at for some time – without, I may say, much success. Your article has opened my eyes to new horizons in how to code this. Great stuff. Many thanks.

posted at 04:34 am on September 20, 2005 by Gordon Tatler

4 printing px

Having a print background I find it strange to see pixels units in a print style sheets. Most printers deal with units like ‘pt’ or ‘mm’. I was wondering why these where not used. The precision they offer is far greater.

Using ‘em’ seems less odd, I mean it’s relative unit. Great for margins. However, when viewing the print outputs on various formats that are commonly used (US paper and A4) I found the lines a bit on the long side.

What worries me even more is the use of Verdana in the print stylesheet, or rather the lack of an assigned font. This really should be a non-screen orientated typeface.

Verdana and Arial are fonts that shouldn’t be used in print work especially considering printers often have better alternatives already available. Such as Helvetica, Frutiger, Times, Garamond, ad infinitum. Which typefaces are generally available is not entirely clear so picking one would be a bit tricky. But going for an OS / browser font is the easy way out.

posted at 07:10 am on September 20, 2005 by Egor Kloos

6 Debugging

If anyone’s interested in how I found out my answer, I posted the debugging steps on Eric’s site .

By the way, great article Eric, thanks for all your hard work.

posted at 08:42 am on September 20, 2005 by Dan Wilkinson

8 fonts & pixels

Let me first say that ALA finally has a very good print stylesheet. Better the most I’ve ever seen. A list apart has become a reference for many a designer and so I’d like to see more awareness of such issues like appropriate units and typographical options.

While some of those fonts would definitely be preferable for printing, you run into the same exact problem that gets you hung up when specifying fonts on web pages: you can specify any fonts you want, but it won’t do any good unless the user has that font installed on their computer.

Your point is certainly valid but I would like to reiterate my view, just for arguments sake.

1. Surveys of web users show a very high percentage of users having Helvetica installed on their system. I’m pretty sure that users wishing to print an article would reflect a higher than average install base of print suitable typefaces. In any case the Verdana typeface is just about the worst font to use for print. Arial would be a more readable alternative, even ‘sans-serif’ would be better. If your site were B2B orientated then this wouldn’t be so much of an issue at all. Corporate users have laser printers and their preinstalled fonts at their disposal. I’d be surprised if ALA users didn’t have more than a few print friendly fonts installed.
2. What of the pixel in a print stylesheet issue? Is a laser printer to take a 1px border literally? Most printers / browsers actually don’t and they’re making a best guess as what it could be. The control ‘pt’ and ‘mm’ units give you is the more logical option.

posted at 10:35 am on September 20, 2005 by Egor Kloos

9 !important ?

I notice that in source the link styleshit for print media comes before the links for media=”all”. Wouldn’t it work and be better to define all media first, then media=”print”, and thus get rid of all theses !important rules ?

posted at 11:46 am on September 20, 2005 by Ozh Ozh

10 White space missing.

Only skimmed the article (print style sheets are so individual, aren’t they), but noticed a little detail in the “a[href]:after” rule: ‘content: ” (” attr(href) “) ”;’ seems to include unnecessary whitespace behind the closing parenthese. Especially before any punctuation, this might be disturbing: “Foo (http://example.org/) .”, instead of “Foo (http://example.org/).”.

I am seeing the opposite problem, which I’m assuming the extra whitespace is unseccesfully trying to compensate for. Using Jens example, the period (.) would appear at about he bottom of the slash (/) and the First letter of the next sentence would be slightly overlapped by the ‘)’.

posted at 12:58 pm on September 20, 2005 by Waylan Limberg