A blog about Ruby, Rails and other Tech. Mostly.

19th May 2004, 7:37am

Browser printing

I was trying to print this page. (It's in Finnish, but that doesn't matter for this discussion.)

I tried to do it using IE, Mozilla and Opera. And none of them can render it correctly for the printer. None of them are even close. All the printouts have information missing from them.

Why is it so hard to make a browser print correctly? It can't be hard to print what would be displayed on the screen. You have to resize the content for the paper size, but this is no problem because the browser has to resize it anyway for different window sizes. And you have to paginate it. That can't be so difficult.

It's pretty frustrating that even now with many years of browser development behind us, printing is still so poor.