I was hopeing to get some advice on creating a successful print friendly page. I know I could just attach a pdf. or word document, but I would like to avoid the viewer from having to download software.

What I would like to do is link it to a page in the website without pictures or banners. Which, is what I have done. The problem is, when I print, words are being cut off on the right side.

Whether is it right or wrong, I am using tables in Dreamweaver. (Having read many threads, I have realized "tables" are not what web designers are using. You are using code) Nevertheless, I have tried to make a thinner table for the text, but it just defaults to the wider size.

More than likely, I am making it harder that it has to be. I'm just missing something.

Forgive me, but I am fairly new at web design and I have had to teach myself everything. I would greatly appriciate any suggestions. Thank you for your time.

Jen

Jen, I'm not sure how comfortable you would are with CSS, but that's the way I'll usually set up printer friendly pages. The basic idea is to use some styles for the screen and others for a printer through the use of the media type style attribute.

You essentially use CSS to create 2 different looks for the page and have one for the monitor and the other for the printer.

Here's an article from About.com that may help with it, but it does require some familiarity with CSS to set up.

Thank you for the advice Vangogh. Deep down I knew I was going to have to learn about CSS. The article you suggested was informative yet overwhelming to me. I am currently trying to read up on CSS. I know I just need to take my time and do it right. I'm sure you understand the difficulty in that when your boss wants things done as soon as possible. But if they want it done right, I guess thats the chance one should take. Thank you again, it is greatly appriciated.

Jen

Ok, I have another question. I am currently walking myself through the instructions on the About.com page suggested earlier. I have gone through my web page and defined the content, navigation, ect within the code.

It then says to define each of them with a <div> element.
- <div id="navigation" name="navigation">

My question is where do I put this within the exsisting code? I know this sounds rediculous to all webmasters, but please bare with me. Any help would be wonderful.

Thank you in advance.

Jen

Jen, I completely understand what it's like learning css. It wasn't all that long ago that I was confused too. Is the page in question online? if so could you post a link to it? If not could you post the code for the page here. It'll be much easier to help if we could see the code.

Just to give you a little extra help, here's the results from Google for printer friendly web pages. The link I gave you above was the first one I found, but some of the other pages may be easier to follow.

One of the main considerations with printing a page is deciding what you don't need to print. If i was to print a page on my site I probably wouldn't include the navigation in the printed version since there's really no need for it. I also wouldn't include images and blocks of color since they'll generally just use up a lot of ink. I know some people like to print the page exactly as is, but I prefer to give them an alternate version.

You might find that creatng another page without the images and extraneous stuff and printing that may be the quickest approach. I know the boss wants this done.

Otherwise post a link or the code here and I'll be happy to take a look as a I'm sure will several others here.

If you want printer friendly pages I would recommend putting it in PDF format.

Thanks again for the posts. I can't tell you how greatful I am. We actually had a meeting yesterday discussing the new website and it was made clear that it should be up and running in less than month. With numerous things left to do, I decided to make another page without images or flash.

I still plan to learn CSS because I believe it can only improve my work. Vangogh, thank you for offering the extra help. I feel fortuate to have found such a supportive community.

Best Regards,

Jen

Glad to help Jen. CSS is definitely worth learning, but it will take a little while to feel really comfortable with it. Some things with css are pretty easy to understand. It should be easy to pick up the syntax for example and converting things from html attributes to css properties and values is fairly easy as well. Using css to layout a site and moving away from a table based layout can take some time to get right though.

I learned a lot from reading a few books by Eric Meyer. A good source of introductory learning is W3Schools.

And of course you can always ask here.