I am referring specifically to pages that cut off the right side of the page.
This includes pages that are supposedly specifically formatted for printing. And I’ve noticed this on some very professional websites - those of major retailers, media outlets etc. I looked around on google and see any number of other people have complained about this.
The only way I am aware to deal with this is to format the page to print landscape, which is annoying. (If anyone knows of another way, please let me know.)
But my question is why this would be? Surely the owners of these websites have an incentive to make their pages easy to print. Why would they have them formatted this way?
In Firefox, in File -> Page Setup, check the box that says “Shrink to fit page width.”
Alternatively, you can copy the important bits into Word and print from there. Or if you know HTML and CSS, you can overwrite the site’s stylesheet and make it even prettier. Typically not worth the effort though.
As for why this happens, well, it’s hard to say when you don’t mention the specific websites. But most likely it’s because the webmaster simply didn’t bother.
Generally speaking, web site owners don’t consider printing their web pages as a customer service advantage. The technical side is rather easy to implement. It’s the mindset that’s difficult to change. In other words, they don’t think outside the box.
Because there are web designers, there are Search Engine Optimization experts and there are web developers. All three things don’t necessarily go together.
I do websites and the basic idea should be every webpage should be compliant to HTML or XHTML standards. However even basic pages like Google fail.
Go to the website validator by w3g.org and type in http://google.com and you will see it fails to pass the basic web standards.
What a browser does is it anticipates that that web people will fail and it renders what it THINKS the writer of the page meant. This is why web pages will look different in IE and Firefox, or even different versions of firefox.
The easiest way around this is to use CSS. CSS is basically a way to put all the formating of the page in one place. In otherwords the font sizes, the colors, etc will be in one place. That way you can easily change the look. This is why a smart webpage developer will either do it right or he/she will put a section saying “Printer Friendly Page.” That way they have a list of CSS (formatting) instructions for the page on the Internet and they can have another set of CSS (formatting) instructions for the page as it appears on a piece of paper.
It’s really easy to do and there’s no reason in this day and age to be that sloppy. But people are.