Printer-Friendly Blog Posts

Have you ever tried to print a post from your blog but wasted tons of ink because it printed everything that you see on the web, including your background, header, sidebar, etc? A friend of mine asked me for help with this and sent me to this site: Create Printer Friendly Blog Pages . It gives instructions on how to edit your HTML so that when people print a post from your blog, they only print the information from that post. The instructions do require some knowledge of html/css.

Before you follow the instructions on that site, make sure you back-up your template first.

The instructions are kind of open, meaning you have to figure out what information to include and what not to include. I'm not a pro at this, but you can use the elements that I used and hopefully it will work for yours too. The list of elements below goes right before the {display: none;}

#header-wrapper, #sidebar-wrapper, #footer-wrapper, #comments, .comment-link, #navbar, .post-footer, #blog-pager-newer-link, #blog-pager-older-link, .feed-links, #blog-pager

 You may need more or less than these elements for your blog, so just use mine as a guide or starting point.

Also, I deleted the line in the code that says this: #main a { text-decoration: underline; color: blue; }
I didn't think it was necessary.

The site also explains how to add a "Print" button at the bottom of posts. If you do not have an image for this part, you can delete the section of code that says: <img border="0" style="margin-right:5px" src="YourImageUrl"/>. Also, where it says "Print this article", you can change it to say whatever you like. i.e. Print this Recipe.

Hope it works!