Print style

Why print styles?

Sometimes you might want to print a page but without some of its elements, e.g. the navigation bar or the footer.

Here's an example of a Database Activity entry.

Screen display

That's how the entry looks in the browser:

Creating a print CSS

The trick for creating print styles is using CSS's @media rule. That way the CSS will only be applied to the specified medium, "print" in our case.

Put the following CSS in a file called printstyles.css in your theme folder and add the style to your theme by modifying the theme's config.php:

$THEME->sheets = array('styles_layout', 'styles_fonts', 'styles_color', 'printstyles');

printstyles.css

/* Print styles for Moodle database activity */

@media print {
	
  html, body {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    width: 100%;
  }

  body {
    background-color: White;
    color: Black;
    font-size: 75%;
  }
 
  div.tabtree, div#header, div.navbar, 
  div.headermenu, div.paging, div#footer, 
  div.datapreferences {
    display: none;
  }

  table {
    text-align: left;
  }
}

You can use any CSS you like. These are only some examples:

• We unset the page margins and padding to use as much space on the printed page as possible.
• We hide those parts of the page we don't want get printed by using "display: none;".
• We set the color scheme to black & white.
• We decrease the font-size.
• We change the text-alignment for easier reading.

The result

And here's the print preview of the same database entry:

Further resources

You will find more detailed instructions in the following articles by CSS guru Eric Meyer:

• "Print Different" - that's what you see in the screenshots above
• "CSS Design: Going to Print"
• His book also contains a whole chapter on "Styling for Print".

Useful tools

• Firebug - for live analyzing and testing of CSS settings
• Web developer toolbar - for enabling only the print CSS even when normally viewing a page in the browser (no resorting to the browser's Print preview necessary)
• Stylish - for permanently applying your own CSS to any webpage - or if you don't want to or can't change any CSS files on your server
  • Stylish-Custom - an enhancement for Stylish with lots of useful features - highly recommended!

See also:

Moodle Docs

• CSS FAQ
• Themes FAQ

Forum discussions

• More print styles using media="print"
• Printer Friendly Reports

General information

• "!important is Actually Useful (in Print Style Sheets)" - SitePoint Tech Times article
• "Handy Tips for Creating a Print CSS Stylesheet"