Problems with printing? CSS solution

Technogeekery for librarians uses one of the many standard design templates provided by Blogger. Like all novice bloggers I assumed that once I had selected the template that I could quite happily forget about design and focus entirely on content. Not so! Over time I've modified the template to include a "list of contributors", an RSS feed, a blogroll and some images. The other day Walt Crawford wrote in Cites & Insights [PDF] about a problem he was having printing from librarian blogs including technogeekery. It appears that if you try to print out some of the longer posts that the left margin floats further to the right with each page printed. Who knew? I just write the stuff, I haven't had to print anything out... yet. So, I would like to apologize to all the readers that tried to print off posts from technogeekery and were less than satisfied with the result. The good news is, I think I've fixed it! This particular Blogger template and many others are created using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These styles are code which may be embedded or linked to in your HTML code which tells the web browser how to display different parts of your code. For example, CSS could tell your browser to display all your headings in Verdana font and all the paragraph text to display in Times New Roman font. The benefit of CSS is that you can use one style sheet to markup your entire web site. If you want to make a change in style you only have to make that change in one location and it will change all your web pages. CSS are definitely worth investigating if you haven't already. Back to the printing issue. After some creative web searching, I discovered that the printing problem Walt describes relates to the Cascading Style Sheet used in my blog template. What I did was modify the existing CSS script to limit it to displaying on the screen. First I added in media="screen" to the existing CSS tag. At the end of this CSS sheet I added in code recommended on a Blogger Forum post. This code removes the side bar and moves the margin to the left. This should make it easier to print longer posts. Hopefully this will solve the printing problem. Why should libraries and librarians care? Well CSS is an excellent way to control how your library web sites appear. It helps with design consistency which can make your site easier to read and maintain. Our patrons may wish to print many of our content rich web pages. Using CSS to establish a print style allows your users to easily print out your content without you having to create a separate "printable" page. Note The CSS modifications work in my Blogger template context. They may not work in your CSS. Hopefully the following references will help you. References Cascading Style Sheets (Wikipedia) Re: "Print this page" script or "print this entry" script by redryder52 in Blogger Forum CSS for Printing (Web Design School Review) CSS Design: Going to Print by Eric Meyer of ALA: A List Apart