G / May 24, 2008
Printicity
Fellow readers of liquidicity, we are surprised. Genuinely surprised.
People print our posts.
We never realised that many of our readers actually like to have a real, physical copy of some of our posts to (I guess) stick on their wall, put in their scrapbook, hand out in the street, or do anything else with.
In all honesty, we never designed liquidicity for printing, and only rarely print posts off ourselves. So today, we decided to see just how bad liquidicity looked on paper - horrendous! The navigation bar showed up as an unordered, un-styled, empty list. The sidebar showed below the content, running over several pages. The default font was, gasp, Times New Roman, and the rest was just bad.
Worst of all, for even short posts at least 3 sheets of A4 paper needed to be printed due to the unordered layout spiralling off down the page. What a waste of ink and paper.
We immediately got to work on a new printable style sheet. Now whenever you print a post on liquidicity, your discerning eyes will be met with a centred, red, bold title, a well sized font, a focus on content, organised comments, and nothing else. No sidebar, no category links, no "digg this" - nothing that isn't needed on a piece of paper. All in a lovely paper friendly font: Helvetica.
So, all we can say is... find your favourite post and hit "Print"! But not too many times, because we really do like trees.
Many thanks to Stass for pointing out that people actually print stuff off once in a while.
Add to StumbleUpon | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Page
Nek said,
May 24, 2008 at 8:19 am ()
Thanks a lot!!!
JanB said,
May 24, 2008 at 8:10 pm ()
Calm down, I usually select the text I want to print out, starting from Title down to where all these useless social bookmarks beginn. Donno if many people do the same but nobody is that eco-unfriendly.
By the way try the Hartija CSS Print Framework, it's a great base to get started ;)
JanB said,
May 24, 2008 at 8:30 pm ()
Haha, thats embarrassing! Just after reading this article I wanted to print out Nettuts.com post about CSS Grid Frameworks. Deeply believing into the skills of the site creator I just hit the print button - without selecting the articles text as a described above. After a few minutes a was suspicious why the printer took so long and checked the printer dialog. It displayed "10 of 27 printed". Wow! Forget my prior statement - I totally support everybody who develops a print stylesheet!
(btw the article took only 6 pages to be printed so I can live with this tragical waste of environmental resources)
G said,
May 24, 2008 at 8:43 pm (Administrator)
Haha, our point exactly!
Many people (including us until now) just don't think about what their sites look like when printed.
On a side note, that CSS Grid Frameworks post is pretty good, Nettuts is a decent blog.
Stass said,
May 26, 2008 at 2:35 pm ()
Smells great :D Thanx for implementing the print style sheet.
Actually I don't print pages that often. Usually I do this when I want to go out, smoke a cigarette and read some stuff in the meantime. It'a a waste to just wander around if you got interesting stuff on your screen ;)
G said,
May 27, 2008 at 1:35 am (Administrator)
Hi Stass,
No worries! Thanks for bringing it to our attention - we don't feel *quite* so bad about our tree destroying evilness now.
Luke said,
June 11, 2008 at 7:38 pm ()
When I "print" a page, I never use paper.. I print to PDF and save it to look at later.
PDFCreator (OpenSource)
http://www.pdfforge.org/