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How to Make Printer-Friendly Pages with Printer-Friendly Page Generators, Creators, Scripts, Code Snippets, and Helpful Articles

If your websites are useful to your visitors  then naturally they are going to want to print your pages out every once in a while. Not everyone likes reading their articles online because of eye strain, blinking ads, distractions, and other reasons.  For this reason, you are going to want to look into making printer-friendly pages so that your visitors don’t get frustrated with your site. The last thing that your visitors will want to do is to print out all of the advertisements from your page. One of the ways to create printer-friendly web pages for your sites is to just create 2 stylesheets, however there are other ways that you will find below such as the use of scripts. Click Here to Skip to the Tools to Make  Printer Friendly Pages

So what Makes a Web Page Printer-Friendly Anyways?

Well not everyone agrees on what makes a web page printer-friendly. For example, some people just delete side and header navigation or move the navigation to the bottom of the page and this is a printer-friendly page to them. However, others see it differently.  However, there are a few things that I suggest if you are going to want to make your web pages printer-friendly.

Tips to Make Printer-Friendly Pages

(1) Change everything on the page to black and white so that the contrast is high and easier to view the page items and text.

(2) Increase the font size to at least a 12 point and a serif.

(3) Make Sure to include the url of the page somewhere on the page so that the reader can reference the actual webpage if they need to.

(4) Remove Ads and interactive items (such as Flash and Javascript Items).

(5) Remove Navigational Items.

(6) No frames.

(7) Remove all images that aren’t necessary.

(8) Underlink the links so that your readers know when there is a link within the page.

(9) Keep a text-based footer on your page, along with your current copyright notice.

(10) Include a link on the page to get back to the non-printer friendly version of the page.

Below, I have listed some great tools and articles that I have found that will help you create your very own printer-friendly pages. Feel free to comment on ones that we have missed.

Tools to Create Printer-Friendly Pages – Code Generators, Scripts, Code Snippets, Software, Articles, and More

Advance Print

Offer a printer friendly page to your visitors. When your visitor clicks on the printer icon, they will be presented with a page with no navigation links, images or other items that the user does not require to print.

PrinterFriendly

The “Printer Friendly” version select the main content of your page, removing the menu, header graphics, advertising and foot content. The script performs the HTTP “get” method via the XMLHTTP object to retrieve the page to be printed. Using the XMLHTTP object instead of something like FSO means that the ASP page is actually executed and not just ‘read’ as a stream of characters.

Print IT

Offer a printer friendly page to your visitors by just linking to the script.

Master PFP (Printer Friendly Page)

Master PFP makes it easy to provide your visitors with a printer-friendly version of your web page. (”PFP” stands for “Printer Friendly Page”)

Web2Printer

Virtually every web page contain informations that is only usable while browsing the website. In contrast importation informations are lost while printing, Hyperlinks for example. Web2printer closes this gap and transforms every web page in a printer-friendly manner. Fully i18n support, use web2printer in your language!

Printer Friendly Pages Builder

Printer Friendly Pages Software is Acroterion’s novel proprietary technology that Generate printable web pages on your server disk, NOT on the fly, as well as enables an entire website to be indexed by all the search engines, and to achieve the top search results ranking.

CJ Printer Friendly Pages Script

The CJ Printer Friendly script takes the content from a page, usually article or news based and strips it of its images and other things that annoyingly take up all that valuable printer ink! All you have to do is insert two comment tags within your HTML to tell the script when to start and finish and then link to the script; to do the rest of the work.

Printer Friendly Pages Generator PHP Class

This is a PHP script that helps you create printer friendly versions of your pages very easily.

What is a printer-friendly page?

This site covers what exactly a printer-friendly page is used for and shows you pointers on creating one.

CSS media Types Create Print-Friendly Pages

This site shows you several options in how to make print-friendly pages.

Make any page printer friendly with Click2Zap

This bookmarklet is for changing all pages that you view, not specifically for your own site. The Click2Zap bookmarklet lets you remove whatever elements you want from a web page to help make it printer friendly.

Printing with CSS and having the Page Break in the Right Places

It answers the question about page breaks.

10 Minutes to Printer Friendly Page

A step-by-step instructions in creating a printer friendly page.

CSS Media Types and Printer Friendly Pages

This site teaches you what each CSS type represents, and how to use the print declaration to create printer friendly pages.

How to Make Printer Friendly Pages

Envisionic reveals techniques on creating printer friendly pages using CSS. The site user just hits “print” without needing to load a new page.

Print View From a DB Template

This is a page with instructions to strategically place a couple of simple tautologies that will display banners and other items in the typical or “default” view and allows a link back to the same page with a querystring value that will be used to suppress everything but the db output.

Printer Friendly Pages

This site includes examples and what fonts are recommended for use in making a printer friendly pages.

Printer Friendly Version Using PHP

This will show your site users what a printout of your page will look like before printing it. CSS handles the printer friendly styles and PHP is used to create a style switcher.

Articles: Print To Preview

A List Apart proposes a solution that uses JavaScript to show the user what the page will look like when printed to avoid leaving site visitors confused after the printed pages look completely different when using CSS.

ALA’s New Print Styles

A follow up to the previous article, this ALA post shows different print styles.

CSS Tip: Design Printer Friendly Pages

This article discusses about the importance of some images and other elements to be left out of the printed version of your page for your visitors’ convenience.

Going To Print

This article from Eric Meyer gives you an example print stylesheet that can be modified for your own needs and it covers things like why it is better to use points rather than pixels.

Printing The Web

This is an informative article which provides a list of reasons why print styles are important.

Print Stylesheets

There are amazing tools in CSS 2 for printing but these tools have not been widely adopted yet.

How to create an unobtrusive “Print This” button in JavaScript

It provides a compact script you can copy and paste on to your page. If users have JavaScript turned off, the link is not rendered.

Printer Friendly Web Pages Made Easy

Complete and easy to follow instructions on how to create printer friendly pages. It even shows you how to specify where a page should break when being printed.

Printer-Friendly Code Snippet

This script allows you to produce a printer-friendly version of any page, whether the page exists on the server’s HDD, or whether it is produce dynamically through passed in vars. It works by placing a couple of user-defined tags around content you would like printed, and also allowing you to specify alternative style sheets. Requires PHP 4.1 or above….

Printer Friendly HTML

It provides you a script that you add to your pages to make a printer friendly page plus, it configures the page for you. If you don’t specify something for print, it just gets ignored.

Printer Friendly Page

Just copy and paste the provided code to make your own printer friendly page for your site.

Willie.com Printer Friendly Page

Teaches you the uses, the how and why’s in making your site printable.

Design Tip: Build Print-friendly Pages

It provides a thorough explanation in making the page layout for printing. It also gives the important details to be considered by researchers in the printed page.

CSS Media Types to Build Printer-Friendly Pages

It provides the code to test @media rules in cascading style sheets.

Printer Friendly Page with SSI

This site will guide you to create a printer-friendly page using SSI.

Make Your Own Printer-Friendly Pages in Firefox

A Firefox extension to help you clean that page up into a “printer-friendly” format called Aardvark.

CSS Cookbook: How to make a printer friendly page with a stylesheet

This will help you transform an existing web document to make it more suitable for printing. This one starts with a regular website design and walks you through the process of create a print stylesheet from the existing design.

Related Articles on External Web Sites

15 Tools to Make Your Site Printer Friendly

ASP.NET Wiki Make Printer Friendly Pages

Learn How to Style Articles for Print and Email

Make Your Own Printer-Friendly Pages in Firefox

Make Every Web Page Printer Friendly

Print Friendly Feature Necessary?

Printable Checklist Makes Quick, Printer-Friendly Checklists Online

9 Browser Add-ons & Tools That Make Printing Web Pages Easier

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