print truncates text

[prefersgolfing]

The Marketing folks are upset; when we print a web page, it truncates the
text on the right instead of wrapping. I've set all td widths to % and still
no help. When I resize the window, the text wraps. How do you keep this from
happening. TIA

By the way, VS 2005, IE6

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

You have to re-design the page to fit within the narrower confines of a
printer. The printer has an even narrower width in pixels then a page on a
site. Setting the widths to % isn't going to do you any good because that's
percentage of the browser size, not the printable page region. Best bet is
to have stuff that really needs to be printed in PDF documents as that's a
controlable document surface. To get a web page that prints well isn't that
great of an idea. The marketing folks should do a bit of research before
burdening you with this. If they were to print out competitive sites how
would they look (pretty bad is the normal answer). That's the major reason
marketing provides PDF documents, to create a standardized format for
printing. It's the same reason that online bill payment sites will have a
"printable version" link that goes to a very stripped down page that only
holds payment information as a receipt.

You can also look into some special extensions for CSS that can be used for
printing. These can make certain elements visible or invisible when printing
and help re-define how the page looks when printed. This can be a true pain
though to gget really working well.

 

[bruce barker]

css has printing support. you create a print stylesheet for your doc.

<link rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css"
media="print"
href="myprint.css" />

in the style sheet make stuff you don't want to appear invisible, use
printer fonts and sizes, fixup background colors, etc.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)