Printing web pages

Printing a web page can sometimes be problematic: common issues include bits of the page being cut off and wasted paper printing headers and footers or even mostly blank pages. Usually these problems are the result of website design but some sites do deliberately disable printing.

Print View / Preview

Some websites offer a Print View of their pages which is a version of that page designed for printing so look for this option on the web page first.
If there isn't a Print View of the page then use the Print Preview function in your web browser to see how the page is going to print out and then adjusting the print settings to get the best results.
To find the Print Preview function go to the File menu in your browser.

How to change the...

Page orientation

Changing the page orientation from portrait (the normal default) to landscape may fix the problem if the right hand side of the page is being cut off.

Change the page orientation in the following places:

File > Page Setup (I.E., Mozilla based browsers e.g. Firefox, Netscape)
File > Print > Properties (Mozilla) / Preferences (I.E.)
File > Print Preview (Mozilla)
File > Print Options > Paper & Orientation (Opera)

Pages that are printed

Page Range Some web pages can be very long and may take several A4 pages to print out, however you may find that you don't need all of them, especially if there are large footers etc. Only printing what you really want saves paper, power and money.

To select which pages you want to print use the options in the Print dialogue:

File > Print: select Page (I.E.) / Print (Mozilla) Range

Duplex / double sided printing

To save paper print on both sides of the page if you printer is capable of doing duplex:

File > Print > Properties > Layout

Printing pages from our web site

Our web site uses a special style sheet for printing that does the following:

Removes the header and left and right sidebars and applies a different footer so that all you get is the content of the page.
Prints out any URLs in the page so that you have the addresses of all the links.

Images collections

Many of our images will be best printed in landscape rather than portrait as they may be too wide for a standard A4 sheet so change the orientation from portrait to landscape.

Trouble-shooting

Having trouble printing a page? try these tricks in this order:

Look for a Print View link on the web page (n.b. may be a printer icon)
Use your browser's Print Preview to see how it will print and then adjust our print settings as necessary
Copy the page content into Word and print from there

In Learning

CINCH