I finally sat down and started some serious work on a print stylesheet for Across the Disciplines. While there are some kinks in the general printout, and I’m certain that tables, figures, and some other visual elements aren’t going to print so cleanly in the current version, The print version of the journal’s articles are far more attractive than they were just a few days ago.
We’re hiding header graphics and nav, and are actually restyling headings for a black-and-white document. Hanging indents in the References are now carried over into the print articles. And more.
I had planned to write a print CSS for Across the Disciplines soon after I recoded the journal for XHTML 1.0 Transitional back around 2007 or 2008. It had been on the agenda for quite some time. It seemed that every time I thought I’d turn some attention to what is really a fairly straightforward project I found myself working on some other part of the site.
Most recently, I thought I’d finally write the stylesheet in December 2010. But then I spent a good bit of late December and January ensuring that the articles in the journal complied with HTML5 standards following a major site-wide overhaul of The WAC Clearinghouse. The result is a site that will certainly remain compliant for some time since HTML5 is still just a draft specification. But that work really left little energy for CSS coding.
Lesson: Write a damn print CSS at the same time you write the screen CSS. It’s easy enough to do and it’s possible that readers will thank you for saving color ink, whitespace, and paper.