Creating Printer Friendly Web Pages

That is actually very tough. Since the user can have their browser configured locally to do all sorts of "nasty tricks", or they might use an "odd" paper size (other than Letter or A4), or even an odd printer, it is almost impossible to control those kinds of variables.

When I have output that needs to be configured a specific way, I create a PDF file (using Adobe Acrobat, the full version). This almost always prints out the way I want it to look (unless the user has a particularly odd config!).

You might want to look into "WebGrabber" from Active PDF (www.activepdf.com) which lets you put a "print to PDF" icon on your web page. When the user clicks this link, it creates a PDF version of your web page on their system.

The idea of printer friendly is to NOT specify things like page breaks and column widths.

You let the browser/printer on the user's machine do this stuff. That way if the user is in the US using letter sized stock, she gets acceptable output. And another User in France using DIN A4 sized sheets also gets his readable output without all the page wasting fluff.

For printer friendly, you just run all the text together in one long column that is as wide as the browser view. You don't put column spacers and text does not wrap the images (it either preceeds or follows it since wrapping is only effective when you know how wide the column is.)

Take a look at the articles here at Tech Republic for a method which I find very acceptable. They open up a new browser view which excludes almost all of the ads and everything (no matter how long it is) appears on one page with no breaks. It always prints fine whether I choose portrait or landscape.
Since I'm in Spain I appreciate not beingforce to use Letter sized sheets to get decent output as they are hard to get here and it's a nuisance to re-configure the printer.

You have obviously missed the point of my response. The difference between page sizes is only one of the variables that you can't hope to fix from HTML. HTML cannot control printers on the users' machines.

Printer friendly means that you let the users' printer determine the final layout. Get it? Friendly to the printer...

If you want to specify page lengths then you have to design you web pages to be "exactly" the size of a printed page. There are no printer commands in HTML so you can not tell the printer to skip a page. So a twenty page document must have 20 web pages and 20 clicks for the user, or one long page and absolutely no way to control where it breaks.

Now, you must remember that what you calculate as a page size is based on what you have set on YOUR printer for margins and page size. The users' printers may have (probably will have) different margins set by default. So the end result is that your carefully designed page gets chopped up into very ugly chunks on most printers.

This is why the best way is to just run all the text together.

You can not control the printer from HTML!

The way that ALL of the major sites solve this problem is to just run the text together. If you must have a very specific page arrangement then the suggestion about PDF's is on target.

By the way, don't forget that not all printers support the font that your web page uses. So when the printer makes the substitution for your font, your beautiful layout goes belly upagain! There is only one solution in HTML--Don't use any formatting other than paragraphs. Let the users' printers decide how to make it fit.

Options to HTML...PDF, Word, RTF, or Word Perfect format files for downloading.

These are the only options that exist. And they are the only options because there is such a tremendous variety of printers that you couldn't possibly predict and prepare for them all--like it or not.