If you want to print our pages and find you’re having problems, try clicking the ‘Compatibility View’ button on the very top bar of your browser […]
We’ve always encouraged people to print out our pages if they want to have a hard copy of some of the material on this site for personal or teaching purposes. Our copyright allows this. To facilitate better page printing we use a standards-compliant style sheet specific to a print media- type — it’s activated automatically when you print. Offering this isn’t a common practice, but doing so allows you to print proper pages without having to print stuff like our lengthy navigation menu and other non-content. Up until now this has worked flawlessly.
If you’re an Internet Explorer (IE) user — this is the default web browser that comes with Microsoft Windows — it’s possible flawless printing may be a thing of the past for a bit. We haven’t tested all the pages, but we did note some issues on at least one shop administrative page so we figure others might pick up on other problems. We decided we’d address this matter proactively.
If you experience any problems printing out the pages on this site, issues such as printing out the navigation and thus wasting paper, here are some things you can do.
Get a Better Browser
IE is up to version 8. IE 8 is a big improvement over IE 7, and a huge improvement over IE 6 and older. One of the main areas where improvement has been noted is in the browser’s modernization by way of simple adherence to current web standards. IE 6 wasn’t good in this area at all. Ask any web developer worth his or her salt what browser gave them the most page-rendering issues in the past decade and they will tell you, IE, specifically IE 6. With IE 7 Microsoft started getting on board with web standards, like other web browsers, and IE 8 is even better. But for page printing, it seems to have gotten worse. There are printing bugs in IE 8.
Personally, I use Firefox as my primary browser. Many will tell you, arguably, it’s the best there is. It is a fully web standards-compliant browser, very secure, optimized, modern, an innovation leader over IE, and it’s free to download and use. You can use Firefox on Windows, Linux, or Mac. And it’s not the only choice. Other great browsers include Safari and Opera. Or…
Opt for Compatibility View
Or you can continue to use IE 8 (IE 6 and 7 don’t have this new issue actually). If you want to print our pages and find you’re having problems, try clicking the “Compatibility View” button on the very top bar of your browser (to the right of the address bar, see image below for a visual reference).
This button is supposed to be used to make older non-standards-complaint websites looks good in IE 8 (it basically tells the browser to act like an older version of IE). Well, this website is extremely standards-complaint and should look good in all browsers for the next twenty years or so (as long as the long-standing HTML 4 and CSS 2 specifications are supported). But, as long as IE 8 has various printing bugs, you might have to use this option to print here even though the pages should render just fine on your screen. To determine what the printed page will look like before actually printing it, on Windows go to File > Print Preview, and check it out. The same is available on Mac.
If you experience any problems, please let us know.
