Making Your Blog Printable
July 16th, 2007
I read several great blogs regularly and when I find something is really worthwhile, especially when it is long, I like to print it out and find a good chair to read it. It is just easier to read off paper than staring at a screen. But not many blogs are print-friendly. Now you could offer a print icon that sends your readers to a special page that just gives them the content that should be printed, but all of that work really is not necessary.
What you can do instead is add an additional stylesheet to your blog with the media attribute set to print instead of screen. For my blog I call this special stylesheet print.css and I have it hide the sections of my blog which are only useful when viewed on the computer, such as the header, footer and navigation.
For the blogs I read that do not have print-friendly pages I use jQuery and Firebug to trim the unwanted portions of the page that I do not want printed by setting the display property to none for each element I want hidden. It works some of the time but nearly as well as using a print stylesheet. By making this print stylesheet available on your blog you can do this extra work for your readers.
July 17th, 2007 at 7:42 am
I've been using a bookmarklet to trim the page down for printing: http://mrclay.org/index.php/2006/04/23/mypage-bookmarklet/
It's pretty simple to use, although I've never used jQuery/Firebug to do it so I don't know how it compares.
July 17th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Interesting. I am hoping the blogs hosted on weblogs.asp.net are set up for printing. It is all done with Community Server so it should be possible to update all of them with a printable stylesheet.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
I absolutely agree with you on this! I frequently print blogs to read offline and most print just awfully. I wish more bloggers and themer authors would pay attention to this. And thanks for the Firebug + JQuery tip and the bookmarklet tip from Scott.
BTW, I use a util called FinePrint that with my duplexing HP printer will print 8 pages on a sheet of paper (4-up front & back with tiny print) or 4 pages on a sheet of paper (2-up front & back with larger print) plus it lets me delete the straggling last page that only has a footer showing of a many-page post. Saves a lot of trees.
That said, here's what I'd really like to see more blogs offer:
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blog/themostawesomeprintdialogonthewebever/
November 9th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
[...] it is really important to make your blog printable. It is not that hard and doing so will help people print out your blog to read when they are away [...]