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> I totally forgot about print style sheets

You know who else seems to have forgotten about print style sheets, at least for a while? Wikipedia. Or maybe they didn't do anything and it was browser support that got worse for a while, I dunno, I shouldn't be too quick to assign blame to a specific party here.

All I remember is that years ago, if I clicked the "print page" link I would get a nicely styled printable version with minimal markup. It was a great way to get a "light markup" version of the page before browsers had built-in "reader view" tools.

Then for a while it just gave me a terrible¹ webpage version - basically showing the left menu bar and the huge logo when trying to print the page. Now it seems to have print style-sheets again, but with a "no longer supported" warning when used on a screen (not visible when printing though). See and compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CSS&printable=yes

¹ terrible in the context of printing, I'm not hating on the regular webpage here



Must-have extension to use before printing anything:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aardvark-duex... (based on https://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/ which is a bookmarklet hence does not work with Content-Security-Policy enabled pages)

It allows to easily and quickly remove stuff from webpages, without opening devtools. Just hover over unwanted element, keep clicking `w` (wider) until you have its whole container, then `r` to remove.


Yeah this extension rocks - i actually copied it and put it in a chrome extension - very weakly, i'm sure, as I know almost zero about chrome extensions - but fwiw

https://github.com/bradparks/aardvark_chrome_extension


Oh wow, that is a really useful extension, thank you!


It's using media queries now, so you can use the browser's default printing function instead of having to find a bespoke button for that functionality.


I feel you are bit confused what print stylesheets are? They are exactly the opposite of having special version of the page for printing, and instead just restyling the same page for different media. That is why the printable=yes page is "no longer supported" in wikipedia, because it doesn't need a special printable page anymore, it can use just print stylesheet on the normal page instead.

This is what the print style looks on screen on Firefox on my computer: https://ibb.co/QN6Gsjk

Pretty decent if you ask me. Sure, technically its not separate stylesheet in Wikipedias case, but media queries, but the effect is the same.


I think you missed this sentence while reading my message:

> Then for a while it just gave me a terrible webpage version - basically showing the left menu bar and the huge logo when trying to print the page.

That is to say: trying to print the page in any way (clicking the "print page" link, using the browser menu) resulted in a webpage-styled output.




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