Pattern 47: Separate print pages
AKA: Perfect printing, Printable version, Downloadable content, Printer friendly

You want users to be able to make a record of all or part of the content of your site. Navigability and AESTHETICS (16) conflict with printability and other kinds of download functionality. Users want NO UNPLEASANT SURPRISES (46) when the data are displayed locally or the page rolls out of the printer. You cannot rely on advanced facilities within the users’ browsers because they may have TWO-YEAR OLD BROWSERS (10). And you have already decided that there should be NO FRAMES ON PUBLIC SITES (27) so you cannot use these either. You have already broken the material up into SHORT TEXTS (44).

Background images, layout, images and other content occurring over page boundaries, typeface sizing and colour, page orientation, and size all cause printed material to appear a complete mess. Data formatted for easy download are not always easy on the eye either and take longer to read on screen than on paper.

Therefore

Use separate pages for printing or downloading a printable or downloadable version of content in a predetermined format.

If the material is purely tabular, the alternative is to pass HTML tables directly (as objects) to another local application or spreadsheet program.

This pattern is terminal within this language.

Contributors and sources
Andy Harbach, Jari Worsley, Nielsen (2000)

Pages are usually hard to print or transfer to other applications. Printed pages often need to the ‘Sellotaped’ together. The result is nearly always messy and cluttered with unwanted material.

Using applets for printing or downloading material to local drives is difficult because of the Java security model: access to printers is impeded as well as access to other devices (hard disks, etc.)

Examples
The TCD (Teaching Company Directorate) used a flash plug-in, with white text on a black background. Work was needed to reverse the colours.

Hometrack.co.uk had a long form, consisting of several (10 or more) pages, available on-line as 10 web pages for completion off-line. It was also available as a single printer-friendly web page (also 10 pages long!).

An insurance company client of TriReme International allowed brokers to access their policy data via the web. Table were extracted from a DB2/400 database and presented via an applet. Printing facilities could not be implemented.

The Guardian (illustrated above) and The Times newspapers both offer both interactive and printable versions of their daily crossword puzzles. Interesting, from July 2001, the latter starting charging £10 per annum for access to the printed version in an attempt to generate some revenue that was not depending on the then contracting advertising market. This presented users with a very simple financial decision: either join the club or do the extra 2 minutes work needed to create their own printable version. Regular Times solvers of course would probably cough up the dough. However, those of us who prefer the, usually more difficult and amusing, Guardian puzzle might well proceed as follows.
1 Hit the PrintScreen key
2 Paste the result into MSPaint or similar
3 Cut and paste the first set of clues and the grid to PowerPoint or similar
4 Go back to the web page and scroll down to the next sets of Across and Down clues
5 Repeat steps 1–4
6 If the clues don’t change print from PowerPoint.
When you design your site try to calculate what percentage of users will tolerate this extra effort (relatively minor in this rather bizarre case).

Keep the page area small enough to print on both A4 and Letter paper sizes. Apply this rule whether printing via the default driver, Postscript or as .PDF files. The print version of the Guardian crossword, that you can link to from the above page, works well and quickly. However, although they manage to print the brand bar and navigation at the top of the page and still fit the grid and clues onto the same page , they then insist on printing another brand bar with no apparent purpose. This wastes a whole sheet of paper. Bad for the environment as well as for the user.

Lyardet and Rossi (2001) give a very similar pattern called PRINTER FRIENDLY.

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