printer friendly page or print CSS....?

Question

Is it better to make separate printer friendly page with "Click to print button" on main page or only print CSS is enough for accessibility and usability point of view?

Answer 1

If you have Iframes or any other frame on your page being printed. Please open new page because that makes problem Otherwise there is no problem.

Answer 2

From a user-experience point of view, it probably depends on the specific circumstances.

If the printed version is going to look substantially different from the on-screen version, it's probably better to provide a separate printer-friendly page so that the user can preview what they're about to print.

If the printed version is just tweaked slightly, but more or less looks like what the user sees on the screen, then just using a print CSS is probably sufficient.

Answer 3

I'd only ever consider print css, duplicating the page content doesn't make sense. The user is able to print preview, but they likely don't care that it doesn't look identical, they just want it to look good when printed.

Most users will just click print anyway - I've seen plenty of emails printed from Gmail where the whole interface is there - they didn't click the print friendly link in the application.

Answer 4

Accessibility and usability for who? If your only concerned about users that are going to print your page, than I'd agree with Rich Bradshaw. Print CSS is more failsafe than a separate printer friendly page. However, having a separate stripped down version could have other benefits. For instance, it could potentially be easier for blind users to navigate inside it. Or, depending on how you build it, it could have a higher rank in search engines than a "full fledged" page.

Also consider bandwidth usage. If the user doesn't links directly to the printer friendly version, it will have to download part of the content again.