David Radin: Solving the mystery of cut-off Web pages
Thursday, January 20, 2000
Q: When printing a Web page using Internet Explorer, the paper comes out of the printer with the right side of the Web page cut off. How can I get the entire page on my paper?
A: This is a very common problem, but one that is very difficult to address with a general rule for all print jobs, primarily because the pages that you're attempting to print come from a number of different creators. They may have made them too large for your Web browser's standard printing setup.
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With Internet Explorer (IE), the underlying issue is that the browser currently does not allow you to scale the page before printing. When you click on the printer icon, your page prints at a default scale - supposedly 100 percent. If the Web page is too wide for the printed page, your printer will simply truncate the right side of the page or create extra pages that have only this right edge. Savvy Web designers are now starting to take this into account by making their pages narrow enough to print on most printers.
Microsoft suggests that if this is happening to you, your printer is set to scale your printed page to greater than 100 percent. However, the problem seems to occur fairly frequently even if the page is not scaled up. Microsoft's solution, if your printer allows scaling, is to reduce the scale of your printed page to, say, 85 percent before printing. Everything on your page will look 15 percent smaller than normal.
For most of us, that's not a practical solution. So let's look at other workarounds.
If the page that you're attempting to print loses just a bit on the right side, you can reduce your print margins to gain that small amount of printable area you need for the entire width. To do so, select [File], then [Page Setup...]. Then change your right and left margins to the minimum margin that is required by your particular printer, typically around .25."
Another workaround is to copy the text you need into your word processor and print from there. This is a quick and easy process if you only want text from the page. If you also want graphics, you'll usually need to copy each graphic separately into your word processor document. The nicest thing about using your word processor is that you can format the page any way you want, including choosing your favorite typeface and font size, as well as insert your own comments right onto the page.
By the way, Microsoft promises that the next major release of Internet Explorer will have enhanced features including print preview. With some luck, the release will also give us some relief from the right-side truncation problem.
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