How to get the printer friendly version of a JSP

[Srini Nivas]

I am generating a JSP that contains dynamic data in tables. The tables can be sorted. Now I what to have a link that displays the printer friendly version of that sorted data. How can I do this?

[Paul Clapham]

It is up to you. First, decide what is printer-unfriendly about how your current page looks. Next, make a new design that looks better on the printer. Write a new JSP to produce that design and provide a link to that JSP. (And finally, throw away the original JSP and just use the new and improved one.)

The only time I have seen "printer-friendly" on web pages is where the normal version is text (like a magazine article) divided into several linked pages covered with advertising and the printer-friendly version has all the text on a single page. Does that describe your situation?

It's also possible to use CSS in such a way that irrelevant parts of your JSP's output, like a column of links or "delete" checkboxes for example, do not appear in printed versions of the output.

[Christophe Verré]

For more information about doing this with CSS :
Going to print

[Srini Nivas]

Thanks....I will try writing a new JSP......I have to remove the header and some gif's from my original JSP, also the sortable links in the tables for my printer friendly version. I am not sure how to use style sheets for that.....!!!

[Paul Clapham]

Originally posted by Srini Nivas:
Thanks....I will try writing a new JSP......I have to remove the header and some gif's from my original JSP, also the sortable links in the tables for my printer friendly version. I am not sure how to use style sheets for that.....!!!

If that's all you want to do then I think you should definitely use the CSS method. If your HTML is littered with <font> tags and other layout controls, then you should really rewrite it to use CSS anyway. Here's the piece of my CSS that controls the print format:

@media print
{
TH.links, TD.links, P.links
{
display: none;
}
}

This says that elements like <TH class="links"> etc. will not appear in printed versions of the page. But follow the link that Satou provided (and links from that page as well) for details.

[Srini Nivas]

I didnt quite get it! Can u give me some sample code???

[Bear Bibeault]

Discussion of CSS is best handled in the HTML forum, so this has moved there.