Printing web pages (properly!)... is it possible at all ??.....

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hello...

I have had the opportunity to print text documents, be it plain text
with Gedit, or from Abiword or OpenOffice's Word processor, and
basically it just worked. So I thought, cool, printing works on Linux,
I am happy ! :-)

But... this time it's a web page I tried to print, and boy, it just
won't print it properly ! :-(

This is the page as it appears in the web browser:

http://www.007.org.uk/~vtrouilliez/tmp/rendered.png

... and this is how it looks when I ask for a print preview:

http://www.007.org.uk/~vtrouilliez/tmp/Print_preview.png


Problems (in no particular order...) :
-----------

1) it only prints part of the screen, omitting the left menu and the
little bit at the top. Actually in this case that's what I wanted
anyway, but what if I wanted to print everything ??!

2) The layout is all over the place, the pics are not positioned
properly, despite me checking the option (in Edgy only) "Frames: Print
as layout on the screen"

3) The fonts are not the same. In the web
browser they look nice and clean, small but easy to read. In the
preview, they are 'serif' instead of 'sans serif', looks horrible and is
difficult to read, and they are also bigger, which doesn't help respect
the layout.


That's on Dapper, but the same problems is in Edgy, despite the new
printing infrastructure in GTK, which Epiphany (my browser) uses. I
also tried Firefox, and also a proprietary browser (thinking it might
use its own printing mechanism, hence produce different results) Opera.
I even tried in Windows XP with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I
also tried printing to PDF, well didn't work for some reason (yet
another problem!), so I printed to Postscript instead. But, in all
cases, 100% of them, I got the same horrible result :o(

Is there a magic stick one should shake at Web browsers to get them to
print what's on the screen properly ? Where can I find such a
stick ?? ;-)

If anyone has a solution to improve (or fix completely, let's dream)
printing of web pages... I will pay you beer ! :-)

Regards,


--
Vince, very disappointed here :o(