Creating a Print Stylesheet

In this tutorial, Rachel Andrew shows you how to use Design-Time Stylesheets in Dreamweaver to make a print stylesheet for your pages - even if they use tables for layouts!
 
Despite the promised utopia of a paperless office, you are likely to find that users will print out your web pages for reference, or to read away from the computer.  As we know, what looks good on the web does not necessarily look good in print and if you site uses many graphics, the user is going to be using up much unnecessary printer ink in getting their copy, as your navigation buttons aren’t of much interest once the application is printed!
 
Many sites link to ‘printer friendly’ versions of their pages. What these versions usually are, is a separate version of the document, created either by hand (which means you have to maintain 2 versions of the document) or by a script, and the printable document will be formatted for print and contain no, or minimal graphics. While this method works well, you do have the additional development time of creating the new pages or writing the script to create the printable page, and you need to have a link on each page that launches this special version.
 
A print stylesheet gets around all of these problems. The print stylesheet comes into play when the user prints any document to which it is linked. You can define any element on your page differently in the print stylesheet and these are the styles that will be used when the document is printed. You can use the print stylesheet to hide areas of the page, such as navigation, graphics-intensive headers or unnecessary pictures; you can change the font styles, colors and sizes in order that the page is readable when printed; you can ensure that the contrast between colors works well even if the document is printed in black and white, and you can even add to the document areas that will only display on printing – such as page related information, to make it obvious where the document came from.