Printer-friendly pages

Rarely, if ever, will a web page print out in any useable fashion. For one, most printers are set by default to portrait, not landscape, which, strangely enough, is how a sheet of A4 paper fits neatly onto a computer screen.

Pages that you want site visitors to print out, for example, order forms, timetables, itineraries, agreements etc., must be tweaked to become printer-friendly. There are various ways to tackle the problem – via style sheets or Java scripts to render a useable hard copy.

But the most controllable, manageable and user-friendly solution is to provide a PDF (Portable Document Format) file version of the page you wish end users to print out. So long as site visitors have Adobe Reader, a free download, installed on their machine, there should be no printing problems.

Most PDFs are created using standard word processing software, so the finished hard copy is exactly what is created on screen. The next step is to upload the document to your web space and link to it from the web page. Again, there are choices on how site visitors access the PDF document.

Firstly, a text link direct to the document. Advise users to right-click and select Save Target As to download the PDF document onto their computer. The weakness here is you are then reliant on the user being able to find the PDF on their hard disk, opening it and then printing it out. All in all, this adds up to quite a few steps.

Another option is to embed the PDF into the HTML page. This is done by using one of the following: <EMBED SRC= "myfile.pdf"> or <OBJECT> tags, or linking using the <A HREF="myfile.pdf"> </A> tag.

Embedding does carry some caution with small type and certain layouts. Always test that the downloaded version can be viewed easily without resorting to the fiddly to use zoom view.

The belt and braces approach is to insert a piece of code that automatically sends the print-optimised version to the printer (assuming the user has switched it on) as well as text link to the PDF. Use this code to send the optimised document directly to the printer:

 <LINK REL= "alternative" MEDIA="print" HREF="myfile.pdf" TYPE="application/postscript">

When working with PDFs always display a prominent graphic or text link to the Adobe site to enable users to download PDF reader software. The latest version, though, is a fairly chunky 27.7MB download.

Useful links
Find out more about PDF creation at pdfzone.com

Adobe Reader 7 download page