Print matters!
This means:
- Never ever use white text on dark backgrounds in PDFs. Do you think people are made of toner?
- Always use a print-specific Cascading Style Sheet on your website. If you won’t do that then at least make sure your regular CSS only applies to screen display and let the browser apply default styles when printing.
Readers like to print. Among other reasons, it saves them from having to bring their laptop into the bathroom.
Yes it’s vital that your PDFs and web pages look good on screen, but if they don’t print well too you’re failing your readers.
Here’s what inspired this post:
- I downloaded an ebook , but it was white text on a dark background.
- There’s no obvious Acrobat or Preview.app way to reverse a PDF for printing.
- Searched Google for a solution, no dice. (Interesting that Google is the default manual for everything. When was the last time you used an application’s help utility?)
- Tried copy/pasting the PDF content into Word and other editors, but the formatting always broke in translation.
- Found an Adobe utility to convert PDFs to HTML, but it just hung forever on a progress bar. Nice job Adobe.
- Remembered that Gmail automatically converts PDFs to HTML. It worked, but the resulting file was unprintable.
- Finally gave up in disgust.
It’s not every day content designers, concepts like copy/paste, and companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google come together to fail so heroically.
2 Comments ↓
Hi Nathan,
First, I would like to thank you for downloading my eBook. As you are unable to print it, I hope you still find time to read it and enjoy it. I’m currently writing another eBook and will take your suggestion of making it printable.
As a writer for both the page and the web, I understand what you mean about printable pages. To be honest with you, though, I’m tired of black text on a white page and wanted to try something different this time…something that would be cost-prohibitive in the print medium.
Still, I appreciate you taking the time and effort to bring up the printability factor. Empathy would’ve gotten the best of most people. I appreciate your attention.
Best,
Geoff
Tapping Creativity
Hi Geoff,
I shouldn’t have written this post in the throes of frustration. Let me say here that I enjoyed your ebook. The total failure of every technical avenue I tried to print the PDF the way I wanted (and the cumulative effect of years of unprintable websites) got the better of me. I’m trying to be more patient in my own mindfulness practice, so when I actually read your ebook I felt a bit silly :)