Ugly Text

[Tim]

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:34 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> The link is:
> http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time

That actually looks reasonably good, on screen, here.  Though grey
writing on white background can be a printing headache, as printers have
to dither black ink to make grey, so you get fuzzy printing.  But there
may be an option to always print text in full black.

The print preview looks a bit worse, mostly for being a bad font.
Inter-character spacing seems too much, inter-word spacing is too
little, and inter-line space being too little, as well.  The first two
being quite noticeably different between the original webpage and
print-preview, with the line spacing being something that becomes really
noticeable because of the other two issues.

For a permanent solution, I'd be inclined to try the following:
Locate your userContent-example.css file (inside the .mozilla directory,
in your home space).  Read it, and create a new userContent.css file in
the same place.  Put some overrides in for print media to use a font
that you find easy to read.  Then restart the browser to use your CSS.

e.g. Start off with the following, and customise it.

@media print {

  /*
     Most printers impose margins already; and some
     browsers do, too.  Stop even more margins
     being added to them.  And reset some other
     parameters for all elements.
   */

  html, body {
    margin: 0 !important;
    padding: 0 !important;
    color: black !important;
    background: white !important;
  }


  /* Set all text to be this font, by default. */

  * {
   font-family: liberation-serif !important;
  }


  /* 
     Set some elements to use a different font, if you want,
     for various types of headings.
   */

  h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, th, caption, label, legend, dt
  {font-family: liberation-sans !important;}

  code, pre, tt {
   font-family: monospace !important;
   font-style: normal !important;
  }


  /*
     Get rid of the underlining of links that you can't click on,
     any more, because they're on paper.
   */

  a {text-decoration: none !important;}

}

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