Print Stylesheet CSS : Blogging Tips

It's really important to have a special CSS to print for any site in the case of a reader wants to print an article for reading it later offline. It often becomes secondary option for all bloggers too in thinking of that who take print-outs of posts anyhow? But, they forget to think that the reader can also save your page in .pdf format too. This is the ultimate guide for all the site owners to build the print stylesheet for their site. You can build a completely separate CSS stylesheet for print, beginning from scratch, or you can develop on the present screen-targeted styles. All this method is contained within CSS by defining print-specific styles by @media Rule. Why this stylesheet necessary? As that CSS stylesheet code is utilized for printing the web pages when the visitor wants to print the web page for his reference. Learn how to set up a print style sheet, how to make your website Printer-friendly with CSS and make print styles using CSS3 @media queries.

Print Stylesheet CSS Trick for Blogger - Problogbooster

Print Stylesheet CSS : Blogging Tips

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What is print style sheet or print.css ?

Its a special CSS defined for a website by using which the reader can print it's particular webpage very clearly without exceeding more paper & ink.

Advantages :

Increase usability & accessibility: A reader/student can print it and use it for later references.
Decrease page loading: Still there are lots of visitors are on slow dial-up internet connection, who immediately go for printable version so that they have relevant information more quickly because such a slow internet connection causes very slow page loading to review the it online.

Disadvantage:

It increases page size for loading after adding this new CSS or if you add hyper-link then it one more request will add to you page loading.

How to view & debug print style sheet

Before you go, check the print preview of you current blog post page. And also check the print preview of this page.

For Firefox : Menu Bar >> File >> Print Preview
For Chrome : Right click on page >> Inspect element >> find setting button at right-bottom-corner >> check - Emulate CSS media.

How to build : print.css

Its really simple as that of we built the CSS for mobile template. You just need to know which part should be printed and which part should NOT be printed.

Lets Start

To start the making of print CSS, a special CSS-tag @media print is used to tell the browser that the current page is going to be printed.

@media print {
... ... ...
...user defined other tags...
... ... ...
}

Now list the parts of your page you dont want to print like menu, navigation, sidebar etc and place it in above mentioned tag like

@media print {
#menu, #nav, #sidebar, #sidebar-wrapper { display:none}
}

Make main wrapper content to full width:

#main-wrapper {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none; }

Remove the background:

body { background: white; }
#container { background: transparent;}

Set font style and size

body { font:normal 14px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; color: #222; }

Differentiate links and text

a:link { font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; color: #000; }

Print URL after links

a:link:after { content: " (" attr(href) ") "; }

Show Thank You message for a reader

body:after { display: block; content: "Thank you for printing our content."; margin-top: 30px; font-size: 11pt; color:#555; border-top: 1px dotted #555; }

Define page margin

@page { margin: 0.5cm; }

Final print stylesheet CSS

@media print {
#menu, #nav, #sidebar, #sidebar-wrapper { display:none}
#main-wrapper {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none; }
body { background: white; }
body { font:normal 14px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; color: #222; }
#container { background: transparent;}
@page { margin: 0.5cm; }
a:link { font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; color: #000; }
a:link:after { content: " (" attr(href) ") "; }
body:after { display: block; content: "Thank you for printing our content."; margin-top: 30px; font-size: 11pt; color:#555; border-top: 1px dotted #555; }
.noprint { display:none }
}

Above sample is just for learning purpose. For every blogger there is different style sheet for each.

Avoid extra stuff to be printed

In above example if you observe, you will get notice the CSS code .noprint. While I was working on this I notice some widgets are still get printed and its really unwanted and annoying on paper. So special CSS class is defined to avoid that extra stuff from paper. What you need to to is just put your unwanted html code as;

<span class='noprint'>
...your unwanted extra stuff...
</span>

And define that class do display: none in stylesheet CSS.

More: you can use this CSS code in cascading to your regular blogger CSS before <skin> tag or if you want you can also use following hyperlink as per your convenience

<link rel="stylesheet" href="URL to your print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

Now start to build your own stylesheet for your lovely weblog site and make it more readable, accessible, usable online and offline too.