problems printing pages from internet

As soon as you look at the shape of your screen and the shape of a piece of paper you'll see the problem. Many web sites are designed to look good on a monitor. Far too few are made to print out correctly...although some do have a "printer friendly version" you can click on before you print (mapquest for example). Because of the way browsers and html work, a web page displays differently on different machines. You may use a larger or different font than I do. You may have your resolution at 640x480 while mine is at 1280x1024. It all changes the appearance and html attempts to make the pages display no matter what we have. This, however makes it tough to have the pages always print correctly. There are methods that can be employed, but I think only a small percentage of sites put the effort in.

Here is a link about the issue:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/7436/86112

(delete any spaces in the URL).

If the site doesn't have a printer friendly version, a few things you can do are:

1) Get it to look the way you want on screen then do a screen capture. Print that.

2) Change your resolution/font size and tinker with it until it prints (if you have the patience)

3) Cut the text and paste it into Wordpad, etc (if you just want the copy)

None of this is a perfect or elegant solution...but until all websites are constructed with printer output (not just screen output) in mind, we'll all face this problem.

Hope this helps some....