Hi, I have a really wide monitor. The web site queries the width of my monitor and not the width of my browser window. Based on that, I get sent a page with lines 500 characters long. (More or less, I didn't count.) So, when I want to print it, the printer software gives me two choices: the left side of the page only, rendering the text uselessly incomplete, or I can have the font reduced so that the 500 characters fit on a single line. I have trouble reading that. These choices don't seem to indicate particularly clear thinking on the usability side of things. Is there a way around this, or should I x-clip everything and hand edit it into a doc I can print? That is not really appealing, either.

Sounds to me like the website to which you refer is badly broken.

If it's detecting the width of your monitor it's doing it with Javascript. You could try disabling Javascript in your browser then visit the site and see what it looks like.

I surely won't argue that one. Were this the first time, I'd just ignore it. But since this isn't the first time, finding and knowing a workable response would be Really Nice. For printing problems on Wiki pages, for example, just switching from Firefox to Konqueror solves the problem (Firefox folks promise to fix it RSN). That didn't work here.

I did x-clip and paste the page into OpenOffice. It worked more easily than I had feared. Based on the URI, I'm sure it was javascript running amok:
http://www.codeguru.com/java/print.p...-Beginners.htm

The preferred solution would be to tell the printing process to wrap lines instead of either trimming them or making the font size unreadably small.

Thank you for your suggestion!

Hmmm. So you get this problem on more than one website? In which case, what evidence do you have to support your statement that "The web site queries the width of my monitor and not the width of my browser window."? Because I suspect that's not happening at all. The codeguru page you refer to renders the same for me whether I have Javascript enabled or not.

It sounds like your actual problem is simply that some webpages don't print nicely. Webpages are designed to viewed in a web browser, not on paper. Some sites include a stylesheet specifically for use when printing which alters the content of the page to make it look good on paper. Look at this page for example http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/ If you ask Firefox to show you a print preview of it then you'll see that in the printed version all the graphics are removed and the layout is slightly different. That's because they creator of the page has taken the time to produce a stylesheet for use when printing. Also, unlike the codeguru page where they've done all the layout using tables (which certainly isn't going to help a web browser in producing a nice printed version), the alistapart page is nicely constructed.

Well, actually, I got that link by requesting a printer friendly version and printed it. Except that I only got the first half of the longer lines. Some time back, I told my system to stop adjusting font sizes to get things to fit. I guess if the web author insists on using tables for layout and tables for layout are broken, then my clip, paste and print solution is the right one. Too bad. Thanks for the google

Try to convert web page to pdf using http://www.web2pdfconvert.com and then print PDF from Acrobat reader.

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