Lately I’ve been noticing that webpages aren’t printing out like they appear on screen, instead they seem to be accessing some secret print version of the pages with just a single column of printer friendly text. This is happening to me in Safari in OSX, but I tried Chrome and it does it there too. This wouldn’t be as much a problem for me except that it also affects the print to PDF function, because otherwise I would take a window screenshot, but that saves as an image rather than as postscript. Googling around, it seems to be related to pages having a separate CSS for printing. But I can’t seem to find a way to make that optional rather than mandatory. Any ideas?
Can you save these pages as either (in Chromium anyway) a complete webpage or an html file, and then load and print the saved page? Maybe with some editing before loading the saved page to clean it up?
This page offers a solution using the Web Developer extension. In Firefox, after installing the extension, you’d use the command Tools/Web Developer Extension/CSS/Disable Styles/Disable Print Styles. They say it’s available for Chrome too.
A properly designed web page should print differently than what you view in a browser. A printed web page has no need for presentation graphics or navigation areas; just the relevant content.
As Space Vegetable recommends, using a Firefox addon to disable the web developer’s print CSS with your own may be an option.
Well that depends on the webpage and why you are printing it. I agree that having that option is useful, although I think it is better implemented as an automatically generated “printer friendly” link rather than a non intuitive printer hijack. But it is screwing with my ability to create a text searchable PDF of the page. Plus, whoever does the CSS usually does a piss poor job anyway with the first page tending to replicate the sidebar text.
I’ll give that a try, thanks.