Circumventing printer control of background colors and images

[mgm_03]

What techniques are there, other than printer Page Setup options, to ensure HTML styled with background colors and background images are printed as displayed on the screen?

AFAIK the printer dialog box has Page Setup options for this but they must be selected.

If there is any other advice for ensuring an accurate web page print-out, pls advise.

[gary.turner]

Whether background images or colors are printed is strictly a user controlled decision.

cheers,

gary

[C. Ankerstjerne]

...as it should be. Printing a full-colour page can be pretty expensive, and you'll seriously enrage people if you force them to do it.

[AlexDawson]

Why would you want to override it anyway? In terms of accessibility the reader will be able to read the contents of the printed page easier if there was no background noise. It would be a seriously bad accessibility practice to force people with vision disorders to try and read from a page which had unnecessary stylistic junk bleeding into the text. Not to mention the cost and ecological impact of all that ink being wasted. Thank goodness you aren't going to be able to force an override of the printing defaults. If the info on the page is that important, it should be visible in the foreground, not loaded in the background (especially as images can be disabled)

[mgm_03]

this isn't a typical website. it's a web-based user interface designed for a small group of people who will want to print the pages containing tables and graphs for use in reports. we'll add a reminder to check their page setup printing options. i didn't know what forum was best for this post, probably CSS.

[C. Ankerstjerne]

If the colours and images are important to understanding the contents, then you shouldn't use CSS and background images.

[mgm_03]

Yes, that's a good point that I considered. However, the only element that this issue applies to is a table that varies in width depending on the data sets it contains. We can't allow cell wrapping so the table must expand.

[felgall]

the only element that this issue applies to is a table that varies in width depending on the data sets it contains.

If you use a border on the table cells for the print version then that should provide what you need for when backgrounds don't print. Besides which the table will have a fixed width when printed anyway as the paper it is printing on is fixed width.

[Stevie D]

It's a problem I've come up against a few times - my websites all make extensive use of print.css, but occasionally I have wanted to print what people see on the screen. The solution I found was to use PrintScreen and and paste it into a word processor.

If the use of background colours is essential and can't be replaced by having foreground contents in a different colour or borders, the three solutions I would come up with are to (i) use Opera (it allows you to print background colours if you want), (ii) save those sections as images rather than HTML, (iii) output in a different format, eg PDF.

[AlexDawson]

Stevie D, all the web browsers (that I am aware of) allow for printing background colors, though it's probably beyond the point, this thread is in the accessibility and usability section and based on that I would only recommend keeping to the user default convention rather than hijacking someone's machine to waste ink