Someone told me this morning that they had trouble printing out my webpage. This was something I hadn't even thought of and I asked her to use print preview first. Apparently the text runs off the page. I thought to correct this by adding a link for a printer friendly version of my page. My question: How do I make sure that the printer friendly version doesn't fall off the page. I intend to make the printer friendly version image free so that may help some but is there a way that I can be sure that it won't fall off the page, not guess my way through it?

thanks.

Something like:

[table border="0" width="100%"][tr][td]
------content here------
[/td][/tr][/table]

(ofcourse you would use the >chevrons< instead of [ ] for your coding)

Also make background on page white and type in black for best printing.

Actually, I did figure it out and I put a link to my printer friendly version on the original page. I just used StarOffice to start the web page using their html templates, then I transferred it to Netscape Composer to add the final touches.

spewey, Very good point, but I'm dealing with race car drivers who access my pages and don't even know how to hit the "print" icon on the top bar let alone know how to change settings in their printer *lol* Using tables for text layout always assures me I have all bases covered!

Using a CSS page (set for media="print") allows you to not have to make a separate printer friendly page. CSS separates content from design ie your .html page would have

<p class="main_text">Some text here<p>

and the .css page (linked in a <link> tag) will have

p.main_text "
color: #999;
font-size: 2em;
>

Now if every page linked to that style sheet and I wanted to change the way that the text displayed I can change it in one place and it will affect the whole site.

Print stylesheets offer special commands that printers can understand, such as where to put page breaks, whether a page is a left or a right (for double sided printing), margins etc. You can also turn elements of your page "off" by using "display: none;" This way you can turn off things like a navigation bar (who needs to see that on a printed web page?).

If you are going to be creating a website XHTML and CSS are the de facto standards for all future web design as layed out by the w3c. There are plenty of tutorials on web.

Good luck.