One of the things that annoys me about blogging systems is that they tend to be printer unfriendly. By the time a header/title and side bars have been added typical of most templates the content becomes squashed into a narrow column. Good for reading online – bad for printing out. So you end up with a first page with sidebars etc. and then many other pages with a narrow strip of text down the middle. I’ve been printing blog pages out recently while referring to things like the Virtual Theology Colloquium and its really been getting my goat.
(The font color also affects things – a medium grey on a white background is easy on the eyes on screen but doesn’t print that well – especially if you’re compressing two pages per A4 like I do to save paper.)
So I thought, on the off-chance that people print stuff off my blog, I’d fix it here first before working out how to fix it when printing other blogs. So there are now “printer-friendly” links at the bottom of each post that generates a nice, plain page in black and white for printing.
There is an outstanding tutorial by Elise Bauer – Printer-Friendly Pages – at her essential Learning Movable Type that showed me how to get started. Together with the Movable Type manual it’s the one site that everyone who’s using MT should look at.
