The Judge RANTS!
Date: 10/08/10
The Not-So-Fine Print
"No good deed ever goes unpunished". Discuss.
As a service to you, my reader, I thought it would be an idea to do something to make it easier for you to print stuff off of this here website. So I went to it last weekend to design an extra set of stylesheets. These would mean that you wouldn't use up all of your black ink cartridge just printing one piece. It would make the print black on white, and would also mean you could print off the main body of the page without the navigation sidebar.
In the process of trying to implement this, I discovered that something was screwed up in the way that Internet Explorer was displaying some of the pages. I then found out that I had made a mistake in the coding of the exception which means that IE displays pages properly by referring it to a different stylesheet to the one used by all other browsers.
The mistake was tiny - a missing '!'. Unfortunately, I had made that mistake in the very first instance of the code, and had merrily copy-and-pasted the error to every single page on the site. '!', indeed; in fact, '!!!!'!.
Having finally sorted that out, I tested the new print stylesheets. Firefox? A small tweak, but apart from that, fine. Internet Explorer 7 (which uses a slightly different stylesheet)? Same there. I then went to my old Windows 98 machine across the room to try the browsers I have on that. Internet Explorer 6? OK. Seamonkey? Oh, arse! Print Preview won't show more than the first page, a problem I'd also had (and had resolved) with Firefox on the XP rig. Opera? Ditto, plus you need to disable the setting which prints background colours.
I'm still working on this, so printing from the site might be a bit iffy until such time as I can work out a fix.
