Printing Help

The stories on this web site are not just broken up to help keep you from getting lost in a sea of letters across your screen, they're printer friendly! If you'd rather read from a printed page than on screen, that's no problem! However, there are some things to take note of before you do so.

Supported Browsers

This site supports ONLY THE LATEST VERSIONS of Internet Explorer (currently 6.0 SP1), Mozilla (currently 1.2b), and Opera (Currently 6.05 with a beta for 7.0), so no bitching as these browsers span the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. This site does not support Netscape 4.x due to its lack of standards compliance with CSS and its outdatedness. It also does not support specific problems with outside implementations of the Mozilla browser, namely Netscape 6 and 7. As Netscape just customizes the Mozilla browser, everything should work the same in Netscape as it does it Mozilla. If it doesn't, well, you'd be better off with Mozilla anyway, as it's not all junked up with Netscape-specific stuff like requiring you to register with Netscape.

Fonts

You need to have the Verdana font, or one that closely matches it. This site was tested on a Windows platform using the Verdana font. Verdana was designed to be the most legible sans-serif font, and as common knowledge goes, sans-serif fonts are more readable on a computer screen than serif fonts (even though the exact opposite is true for print media). While the CSS code will try to use Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, and the default sans-serif font (in that order), the Verdana font is the "biggest" of them all, so your pages may consistently come up short. It is recommended you try to find the Verdana font for your system. Also, if you have a closer-matching font for Verdana on another system, please contact me and I'll tell the site to use that font as well.

Printer Margins

If you actually keep documentation, look in your printer manual for these specifications (usually towards the back). If you didn't keep documentation, or if you got your printer as a hardware bundle with a computer which didn't give you a separate printer manual, or if your documentation is electronic only and/or you're too lazy to open your documentation, you can always fire up a word processor like WordPad and try to set all of your margins to 0. If your word processing software is any good, it'll either bitch about the setting and offer to fix it, or automatically bump up the margin to your printer's minimum without saying a word. Pay attention to these fixes as they are your printer's minimum margin requirements.

Adjusting Your Margins

Make sure that you have no more than 0.5 inches between you left and right margins. Most printers can handle 0.25 inches for both left and right, but if for some reason your printer can't, just adjust the margins so that left and right margins add up to 0.5 inches.

Make sure that you have no more than 1.00 inches between your top and bottom margins. While laser printers will have no problem with 0.50 inches for the top and bottom margins, inkjet printers may or may not be able to print that close to the edge of the page on either the top or bottom margin. For inkjets, one of the margins is usually ridiculously small while the other is ridiculously large. If you can't set it to 0.50 inches for both, try 0.4 and 0.6, or 0.3 and 0.7, etc.

To change your browser's print margins:

FOR INTERNET EXPLORER USERS: Click File > Page Setup
FOR MOZILLA USERS: Click File > Page Setup > Margins & Header/Footer tab
FOR OPERA USERS: Click File > Print Options

Special Notes

FOR MOZILLA BROWSERS (including Netscape 6 and 7): Click File > Page Setup and make sure the Shrink to Fit option is checked in the Format & Options tab.

IN ALL BROWSERS: You may notice the text on the screen does not flow the same as the text on the printed page. For example: With two pages, one appears longer than the other on the screen, but when printed they're exactly the same. Or, as you compare the printed version to the one on the screen, you may notice word wrapping kicks in at slightly different places. This is normal with CSS, and one reason I put off implementing it a little longer than I should have.