New Site Design - Problems printing web pages (only background image appears)

B

bidarsan

I've been working on redesigning my site, and came to an "example"
page. I have been trying to print a representative page (see
www.orangefrogproductions.com/ofp2o_home.shtml from my test site) to
PDF, and only get the background image. I have been designing sites for
a number of years, and seem to remember having this problem some time
in the past, but, for the life of me, cannot remember how to fix it.
(Besides, back then, it probably had more to do with frames.) The page
looks great in IE6 (and is generic enough, I believe will look pretty
much the same elsewhere), but I have a positioning problem in Firefox
(page-bottom div overlays near the top of the page, which I think can
be fixed by adding a "position: relative", or the like to the div). The
problem seems to be in printing the page "as is". The problem also
shows in Print Preview. (only the background appears).

I have a lot of stuff in my CSSs, and am using most, if not all of
them. Most classes are named "generically", and work for me. Don't get
on me about that, huh? ;-) I am also using server-side includes (SSIs)
for my sidebar, page top (banner) and page bottom (linkbar/copyright
info), and don't believe that is the problem. My index page at
http://www.orangefrogproductions.com/ofp2/ prints, but doesn't use the
SSIs, maybe they ARE part of the problem...(?)

My CSSs are at www.orangefrogproductions.com/ofp2/css/ofp2.css (main
CSS) and www.orangefrogproductions.com/ofp2/css/ofp2p.css (print css).
I have a print CSS because I am going to drop the background, sidebar,
breadcrumbs and linkbar from the print, and attempt to add the links in
one of a couple of ways (see
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/improvingprint). I also plan to
change the colors to black or gray, and a few other odds and ends.

For the print CSS, I have commented out most, if not all, of the
relavent "floats", and have played around with positions. I have also
tried commenting out bits and pieces, and cannot find what is causing
the problem. (BTW: My original site pages -
www.orangefrogproductions.com - print fine, and when I change the
absolute position of the full-page div to static, it appears I will
only get one page of printout, where when it's left alone, I will get
11 pages. But again, only the background prints.) I have removed (and
replaced) the image, the color. I'm at my wit's end! (Showing my age,
huh?)

Does ANYONE have any idea what the problem is and how to fix it without
going through 150+ pages?

I thank you in advance for any help and insight you can give me.

Bill S.
 
B

bigdaddybs

Arne said:
If I'd know what you are talking about?

/Arne

Thank you. I appreciate your help *sarcasm here*.

I would have thought it obvious to anyone who had actually read (and
tried to click the link) on my first post. And, that since no one had
said anything that they would simply read through the first, notice the
2nd was from ME, and realize what I was talking about.

In case you missed it, I entered the url incorrectly (manually) in the
first post. The second post corrected that error, and I didn't think
anyone would want to see the whole (or even part) of the first post,
again. I apologize for confusing the issue.

Thanks for the links, anyway. *genuine thanks*.

BS
 
C

Chris F.A. Johnson

Thank you. I appreciate your help *sarcasm here*.

I would have thought it obvious to anyone who had actually read (and
tried to click the link) on my first post.

What post was that? You do not know whether anyone has seen it, read
it, or forgotten it.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

bigdaddybs said:
Thank you. I appreciate your help *sarcasm here*.

I would have thought it obvious to anyone who had actually read (and
tried to click the link) on my first post. And, that since no one had
said anything that they would simply read through the first, notice the
2nd was from ME, and realize what I was talking about.

In case you missed it, I entered the url incorrectly (manually) in the
first post. The second post corrected that error, and I didn't think
anyone would want to see the whole (or even part) of the first post,
again. I apologize for confusing the issue.

Thanks for the links, anyway. *genuine thanks*.

Since you genuinely appear not to understand I will try to explain why
your are not getting the help that you believe that you are entitled to.

This is Usenet not Google Groups. What does that mean? Well, it means
in Usenet when accessed with a real newsreader all the posts of a
threaded are *NOT* displayed as a single column of posts on a web page.
Google Groups 'interprets and reformats' Usenet to appear that way. So
users with newsreader may not *see* your previous post *unless* your
reprint (i.e., quote) the previous bits to which your are referring to.
As such your comments appear out of context and are meaningless.

"Why is a duck?"

So what you should have done was read the links that Arne posted:



And then you would have realized you should have preceded your URL
correction with a quote of what your where correcting!

Lastly, and you may pickup on this if you read about Usenet a bit. It
can be a very useful resource for discussion. And "discussion" is a key
word here because what happens here are "conversations" and must be
approached as such. You can learn quite a bit, but it is not a help
desk. Many are willing to help be they are not obligated to do so. No
one is paying us.

Now taking a cursory look at your site:

If this is a redesign I think you should design with "strict" and not
"transitional" doctype, Keeping IE out of quirks mode can alleviate a
lot of headaches. It is great that you are using stylesheets and not
deprecated markup, but I would say two things about what I see--your CSS
appears *way too* complicated and over managed, you may have more
predicable behavior and better artistic results by simplifying it.
Secondly your CSS seems to employ too many IE hacks (which also can be
related to over management) If in your base design you allow for some
flexibility as to how your page will display in different browsers your
results may be better. I noticed that regardless of how wide my browser
is (even a 2048 pixels wide!) your page is *always* wider with a
horizontal scrollbar! That is a fundamental design error. You have made
your basic layout blocks of your page add up to more that 100%

Note: Don't use IE for your standard here. Use a real web browser for
design (then tweak if you have to to get IE to cooperate).

Problem may be that you have DIV "main-page" set to 100% width and your
BODY has default margins and padding (>0) AND you have a floated navbar
that makes your total width >100%. but with 3000+ lines of CSS I do not
have the time to debug for you.
 
B

bigdaddybs

Ok... I give... I apologize to all concerned. I have used usenet
before, but you're right in that I am accessing it thought google
groups. Again, I apologize. (And no... I don't believe I'm ENTITLED to
anything. It's just that Arne's comment hit me the wrong way. Yes, I
understand the "Many are willing to help be they are not obligated to
do so.", and never said anything about "obligation". I do understand
about quoting, but am more used to threaded message boards and forums,
so DID misunderstand.) I apologize to you, too, Arne.

Attempting to CSS everything may be the problem, but again, I'm
dropping depreciated language, and doing what I have read and learned
about. I'm self-taught, so am learning as I go. So far, throughout the
site, I've used almost all of the ids and classes I have listed.

One thing... while there may be a lot of lines in the CSS, I also
commented it profusely, so I (and anyone else who actually reads it)
knows what I did, and hopefully WHY. (A carryover from my programming
days, when documentation was important!) And, many of the attributes
are listed VERTICALLY, rather than horizontally. I used abbreviations
for classes, so I can use them in numerous places, even if they were
designed originally for a specific one (fcr = font color red, hbbqrly =
heavy border/blockquote replacement/light yellow, etc). Many of the
"lines" of the CSS have to do with cascading the attributes for various
pieces and parts. Maybe there's a better way, but it works for me, at
least this time.

To the original problem -- I managed to get my page to print well
enough for my example. I did reconfigure the divs in the CSS, removing
the negative margins, removing the Column class float and position
attributes (left the class for the "make the columns the same length"
thing), positioning the main-page div (static) to left: 0, top: 0 with
a 130px left margin, and floating the sidebar left with margin 0. I
also removed (commented out) a full-page > full-sidebar setup. I played
around a little with the other divs (the odd-named ones) and got
everything to print correctly. A lot apparently had to do with
positioning and floating. (I'd heard that before, but...)

To be sure, it still doesn't print correctly (ok... in IE6... still ...
with the sidebar on the top page, and it leaves a large bottom margin
on each page), but it was enough to create my example images using
cropping, cut-and-paste. (Ok... I cheated... For this, it works... ;-)
)

Since the sidebar will NOT be part of the normal print, when all is
said and done, I'm not too worried about it. (Plan on making it and
linkbar divs display:none.) I'm also not too sure why the column class
didn't handle the relative positioning, but at least it's to this
point.

I appreciate your comments. Next redo, (took three years to get to the
point I wanted to, last time!) I'll try to "simplify" or name things
better (especially IDs... the classes are too generic, far as I'm
concerned, and the abbreviations make sense, again, at least to me ;-),
and no one else "messes" with my personal webpage).

I do appreciate constructive criticism (as opposed to complaining to
complain or name-calling or not explaining what the problem is.)

Thanks for your help.
Bill

PS: The page in question is at
www.orangefrogproductions.com/ofp2/ofp2o_home.shtml, and I'm getting my
information through
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.html/browse_thread/thread/ccdfaaae63e1c448,
which threads my first message at the top. Again, I apologize for the
confusion. BS (my initials... Not saying... you know.)
 
D

dorayme

"bigdaddybs said:
Ok... I give... I apologize to all concerned. I have used usenet
before, but you're right in that I am accessing it thought google
groups. Again, I apologize. (And no... I don't believe I'm ENTITLED to
anything. It's just that Arne's comment hit me the wrong way. Yes, I
understand the "Many are willing to help be they are not obligated to
do so.", and never said anything about "obligation". I do understand
about quoting, but am more used to threaded message boards and forums,
so DID misunderstand.) I apologize to you, too, Arne.

What might induce you to stop top posting?
 

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