Opinion: Sometimes your viewers like to print out your Web pages to read offline. Make it easy for them with planning and CSS.While I do think it's a myth that people don't read on the Web, I can attest to the fact that they don't read everything on the Web. I don't think I'm alone in that I like to print out longer articles to read offline. In fact, I keep a notebook full of helpful tutorials, articles and essays near my desk for easy reference.
There are also times when I want to print something off and pass it around to my colleagues and coworkers. Sure, I can e-mail a link, and I often do that, but if I really want someone to read something, I'll print it out.
Things like lists, directions, reviews and tutorials are all things I feel have to be able to be printed in a clean, readable format. Unfortunately, it seems many publishers don't put too much thought into printability.
A few make use of CSS and supply print stylesheets to improve printability. More sites do offer a link to a less-styled printable page, and these work fairly well. Most, however, seem to have taken no action at all toward making their content as printable as possible.
Should IE7 support CSS better? Click here to read more.
If you want to insure you're content is making an impact, and getting through to as many people as you can, you should take some time and get your pages as printable as possible.
What Makes a Good Print Page
As someone who prints from the Web quite a bit, I'm often surprised at how poorly some pages print. If you print your pages and they have unreadable text, or useless Web remnants like navigation, empty graphic boxes and the like, you probably need to do some work.
Even those that print well have problems. Some have too much clutter. Some aren't formatted for easy reading offline. Keep in mind small text is just as hard to read on a printed page as it is online.
Why should you care about Web 2.0? Click here to read more.
What readers really want is a nice, cleanly formatted page that contains readable content. They don't mind a bit of branding, this actually helps by putting context to pages, but in general readers just want the content.
The font should print large enough for most people to read, and there should be a generous use of white space. Keep in mind those things like margins and paragraph spacing, they're much more noticeable in print.
Images should come through the same as the do online, if they are of any importance, and non-essentials such as presentational graphics should be stripped away.
CSS is a Great Solution
One of the nice things about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the ability to specify specific styles for print. This can be done in a separate styesheet or as part of a master stylesheet, depending on the techniques you use. There are pros and cons to each method.
Yahoo hires blog journalist to cover war zones. Click here to read more.
I'm not going to get too far into how you actually go about setting up a stylesheet for print, but I can assure you that it's relatively simple. I'll refer you to the following resources that can provide you with much more detail than I could here:
The key to note here is that you can use CSS to provide your readers with printable Web pages and that it can be much better solution, for many reasons, than having a separate link to a printable page.
For one thing it's one less page you need to worry about as a publisher.
It's also one less click for the reader. Honestly, there are only a few situations, one being page views for advertisements, where you'd want to go with a separate printable page as opposed to a nicely formatted stylesheet.
Even if you do go with a separate page online, CSS can help you style that page for the best possible printability. All too often publishers simply don't put enough thought into the printability of their pages, regardless of how they present them to the reader.
If you've got a readership of any size, you've probably got a good number of people who'll want to print your content out. It's in your best interest, and easy enough to do, to make sure you've taken steps to make sure your pages print as nicely as possible.
Web Design 
