Websites Should Be Printable

But website printing in general, I see less of a need.

You copy with a pen or pencil, like the monks did.

Yes to cut and paste with scissor and glues.

I do love an e-ink display, but I just like holding a sheet of paper, and not having to jump through menus to read something especially if I'm actively referring to it and revisiting it. Plus I can use my coloured fineliner on it, whereas the PDF viewer on my iPad crashes sometimes crashes if you look at it funny.

We had just completed yet another other redesign and our (React) pages printed completely mangled and users hated it. We regularly got feedback about it.

And yet it was so low priority that me (UX designer) and a developer had to team up and get off the record permission to spend a few days fixing it in CSS alone while our managers covered for us.

When people for whom $29,000 is an enormous expense are purchasing a car, you can bet they are printing stuff and very, very carefully considering their purchase. Primary demographic was not young, tech native people.

For a couple of applications I have built recently, an offline view of the data in print form has been part of the design requirement. It's still reasonably common in situations where people will meet in real life and a physical clipboard will be needed with a register or some physical signatures are needed, or in situations where paper goes home with people from meetings for them to read and sign. So, lots of school/community/disclaimer tasks where you can't presume people have devices (or a device wouldn't be usable/practical/useful, especially in outdoor contexts).

These days PDFs are also useful for marking up in some devices.

For my own work, making an app printable is a basic thing I always do — it's part of the normal process.

But that often means little more than disabling headers/footers/sidebars, rendering simple text where a logo was, putting in page break guidance at sensible points, perhaps overriding a few text colours, maybe a couple of media queries for items that need to only appear/not appear in print. Basic stuff. From there, most "print this" views are little more than a slightly simpler template.

The cool thing about is that printability often comes up late in the requirements, and it's a thing people try before they ask you about it — they try to print from the demo. So it's an easy positive surprise if the print view does more or less what the user would hope for, right from the beginning.

Making it so all of an interface is at least basically printable is actually easy if you plan for it, and it's a good way of keeping focussed on broader usability.

Generally speaking, if you are in any group situation where you meet in person and want to share something, paper is still king. Easiest to share and no distracting electronic devices.

Also for learning I often prefer physical books and printed out worksheets. It helps engage the spatial memory plus you can write on them with an actual pen which also helps recall compared to typing.

This was something that sort of escaped my notice until I finally had to replace my 2011-era HP printer. I chose a SOHO HP printer, and basically, it can't properly print anything, not even 2-sided, unless I go through the Linux subsystem on the Chromebook. This is fine, because I seldom print stuff, but it's just emblematic that neither ChromeOS nor Android really wants anyone to print anything, ever at all.

When choosing to replace my printer with a modern one, my other option was to not replace it at all. I could easily upload documents and print them at the UPS Store, or Staples, or FedEx Kinko's, the public library, or a pharmacy photo department or something. There is not a shortage of outsourced print shops around here. Perhaps I spent way too much money on a SOHO model. But at least I can scream and rage at the printer drivers in the comfort of my own home!

There are a number of Slack and Discord conversations I'd have liked to export off to PDF, for instance (where a solid 90% of my "prints" go). I'm reminded that one of Slack's boot messages used to be, "Consider the environment before printing this Slack."

For one, it often entirely heads off the requirement for "can we have it so the user can download a PDF of this?" (because users generally know how to print things!)

And for another, it broadens your options for implementing those PDFs if that requirement doesn't go away. You may not have to restrict your markup to that which some PDF generator library can work with, because printing any page in a headless browser is easier.

You often don't have to do much in a CSS stylesheet to get a modern site to render well, because we've moved away from so many layout hacks in general.

So you're primarily left with hiding content that shouldn't be printed (like navigation or menu buttons), defining page breaks, and some other quality of life changes for printing.

This comment suggests the answer is yes.

Happy paralegals are a finite resource.

But yeah. Someone, somewhere, is printing your web pages for their own reasons, and you may never know whether poor printability cost you.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Frag...

It's not the end of the world.

But as it goes, not everyone has the motor control to _only_ scroll a phone view vertically; unexpected horizontal scroll can be frustrating, especially when one very wide element leaves the screen otherwise confusingly blank elsewhere on the page.

(I've actually witnessed this frustration from an older user in real life)

The way to handle elements wide enough to induce horizontal scrolling is to put them in a <div> (or make CSS for the tag in question) and make CSS with overflow-x: scroll; for just that element. An example from one of my webpages:

  pre {max-width: 90vw; overflow-x: scroll;}

For you :-) Now imagine you have to use a mobile device but have limited control over your hands, and it's difficult for you to do a vertical scrolling gesture without some horizontal drift.

I've seen this in real life. Why not make things easier for that person when you can? Accessibility is for everyone. (General accessibility rule I like — if it's a persistent minor annoyance for me, it's possibly a dealbreaker for someone with an accessibility requirement I've not thought of)

Your suggestion for constraining horizontal scroll to unavoidably overflowing elements is good, though — I do that too, and I've ended up figuring out how to add affordances so it's clear that scroll is possible (shadows that appear and disappear)

I often have to print for example online shopping baskets so others can decide which offer they will take. Meaning how your shopping basket looks print absolutely will have an impact by annoying or pleasing the people who make the decisions. Needless to say, 99% of all shopping baskets look like trash when printed out.

If you have a blog, it would be reasonably that someone might want to read your article offline or store it for archival purposes. Having that look decent is not a bad thing. And it is not that hard.

The only way to work around this is to have two sets of chess pieces in the font, one with a white background for pieces on light squares, and one with a colored background for pieces on dark squares.

Printing web pages is rare enough I just assume someone doing that will also click on “print backgrounds”.

(The reason to not use images for the chessboard diagrams is because they use more bandwidth and can’t have usable “dark mode” colors)

  background: #eee;
  print-color-adjust: exact;
  -webkit-print-color-adjust: exact;

[1] https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

After all TeX is all about high quality printing on paper.

Even now this is not that uncommon; I have worked with an entrepreneur masking significant dyslexia in just the last five years. Printability was just something he needed so he could properly scrutinise.

Print is still an accessibility thing, I think.

So I don’t think there’s much merit arguing about what doesn’t exist any longer.

This distinction is important especially because people are notoriously confusing the two and expect web apps to be like websites and conversely implement websites with tech that is supposed to be used to build web applications bloating internet pipes with JS where HTML and CSS would be sufficient.

Beyond that, the distinction is purely arbitrary. Same tech stacks, same delivery methods, and the same client-side display tools.

This kind of fairly idealistic thinking is so far from the ordinary web development norm that you have to go past "supporting that version of IE with 0.7% market share" to get to it.

Most "I need a printout of this" information is timely and dynamic and needs fixing in a physical form.

A print stylesheet seems like something you could get an LLM to write.

I mean, everyone has their own workflow preferences so I wouldn’t criticise you for wanting to use AI in your own personal set up. But it feels like your two statements there should be moral opposites of each other.

I politely disagree, the problem is we have made websites a javascript hellscape with all that original intent broken by design.

Years ago I was never using the "print" command in browsers. I used the "save" command. But now the "save" command is useless for most sites, because the saved scripts frequently do not work offline or they do not work even online, but from local files. So the only alternative is "print", which is extraordinarily buggy in both Firefox and Chrome, but their developers do not give a ****, so there are many years or perhaps decades since printing in Firefox or Chrome renders completely incorrectly almost all Web pages.

As a workaround for the stupid rendering in Firefox and Chrome, I frequently print twice a Web page, once in Portrait and once in Landscape, because the corrupted parts of the printed page will typically occur in different locations. Moreover, I may have to fiddle with other printing parameters, e.g. whether to print backgrounds or not, or with different margins and paper sizes, because it is unpredictable which settings will work best with a given site.

And I politely disagree right back. My particular problem with this has to do with purchasing. When I make a purchase at work, I need something I can attach to a purchase request as a quote. Note that this is often not a formal quote, but rather evidence of what whatever I want to buy will cost.

A simple way to do this is to print a shopping cart to PDF and attach that to the PR. Some web sites do this just fine and others do it horribly. They should do better.

Maybe you could capture the full height of the website as a screenshot? There are extensions that do this, and there is some degree of native support for the feature nowadays.

Thankfully, most of the web sites for which I want to do this — banks and other financial institutions, but others also — have easy ways to create printable receipts because they know that people want to do things like this.

And you can disagree, but when I come across some e-commerce site where printing what I want or need to PDF doesn't work because the site just makes a horrible unreadable mess out of it, I think, well here's a set of "web developers" who are just not good at what they do.

(And yes, I fall back to screen shots when I must.)

But to expect every author also upload a PDF? I mean, TeX is great for what it is, but there's a reason _the web_ adapted print stylesheets.

Even if (La)TeX (or Typst, or Postscript or anything else) were easy to learn, you're left with maintaining 2 copies or a compilation system which is also a challenge.

read books too.

if anyone thinks msdn, github, reddit, stackoverflow, and soon if not now (hosted) llm's don't export and mine their users queries for architectural goodies...

developers ALL have targets on their backs, it's just the way the world has evolved.

You still gotta keep it secure. ;)

and you can, without attacking the GP statement about their PERSONAL preference, or clumsily trying to tar them with some sort of pejorative NASCAR paintbrush.

* (Bitcoin, I'll agree, is an even more massively irrational and wasteful human endevour, but that doesn't mean all printing is awesome:)

* This is not to say that some webpages shouldn't be printable, I agree that they should - for a lot of the webpages focused on displaying information rather than interaction, making them print consumable is good. Just that parent's comment doesn't make them the buzz-kill party-pooper, necessarily :)