Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/designing-wordpress-themes-for-printing/
In this tutorial we’ll take a look at what designing a theme for printing means and how WordPress theme developers can design their themes for printing. Designing a theme to look great in a web browser is not enough, some people still like (or need) to print out web pages for various reasons, so we also need to design themes to look great when they are printed.
Throughout this article I’ll provide some basic CSS which can help to take your theme to the next level by optimizing its interface for printing. If you’re a theme developer then you can directly embed the CSS in your theme. If you’re a WordPress user and if want to make your current website print ready, then you can install this code via a plugin. I will go through all these steps in detail below.
How to Determine If a Theme Is Print Ready?
By default, when a user prints a WordPress web page that is not print ready, the style sheet is stripped away and the page prints as if there is no style sheet. It tends to look like a long line of information, starting with your header, the content, then the long list that is your sidebar, followed by the footer. It’s not very pretty.
A theme is typically said to be print ready if, when it’s printed, it only prints the website name, post content and comments. It shouldn’t print widgets, ads and other such elements. For image and anchor tags, it should display the URL beside the image and link text. Images should fit the width of the printed page. Backgrounds should be clean and the text should use standard fonts and colors. Overall the text and images should be easy to read and view, and must be aligned perfectly in the page.
One of the best examples of a print ready website is SitePoint. Go ahead and press Ctrl + P and check out how it looks.