Re: [PLUG] Web Pages Look Different on Screen and Printed. Why?

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I googled for "why do web pages look bad when printed" and found a few
pages offering some advice. But as Bill said, the big problem seems to
be that the front-end web developers are optimizing things so that web
pages look good on continuously scrollable web browsers, not printed
pages. What should happen if you try to print the Gmail page? Or
Twitter? Should it generate 1000s of pages of output?

One thing you might try is to see if your browser has a "Reader"
mode. This mode typically strips out most of the graphics, leaving
primarily text. This might well be more conducive to printing.

Walt

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 03:28:57PM -0500, Bill East via plug wrote:
> You're not going to like this... but "it's a feature, not a bug."
> 
> How wide is your browser window? How big is your screen? Vertical
> or horizontal? Where are the "page breaks" on a scrolling browser screen?
> Well-written HTML with good CSS (which is slightly more common than
> rational and polite discourse on the Internet) adapts to whatever format
> you want to display it on. So you would expect that what looks good on your
> screen might look terrible on paper, especially if it's a graphics-heavy
> layout that will drain your ink cartridges dry. This actually was one of
> the advertised benefits of PDFs - what you saw on the screen would be
> exactly what got printed on the paper.
> 
> That said, you do always have the option of a quick screen print if you
> want to show exactly what you are seeing on-screen.
> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 9:55 PM Casey Bralla via plug <
> plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> 
> > This has been an growing annoyance for me.
> >
> > I see a web page and try to print it, but the printed output often is
> > wildly different from what I see on the screen.  I've read that there is
> > a separate CSS for printing, but I don't understand why.
> >
> > Why doesn't a browser render the print output the same way it renders
> > the screen output?  The dimensions of the paper and the screen may be
> > different, but those differences are trivial compared to the gawd-awful
> > print output of some web pages.
> >
> > What the heck is going on here?
> >
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