Make printing work better with the Web

As promised, I
want to talk today a little bit more about printing experience in IE7. Printing
is after navigation/search one of the most used features but it still lacks the
fidelity of like say a photo printing program. Why is that? Content for the Web
is in general not designed for printing. If laid out at 100% it generally
exceeds the space provided on the paper. In IE6, for example, you end up often
with cut-off right margins. Another very common problem when printing for
example receipts of the Web is that you end up with 2 pages of paper where the
second page only holds 2 lines of useless information like copy right statements
etc. These are all examples where the authors did not think of the user
printing.

Our goal for IE7 is to put more control in the
users hand to get the Web right for printing. In IE7 Beta1 you will see the
first steps in this direction. Keep in mind this is just a teaser of what you
will see in Beta2.

For Beta 1, I want to emphasize 3 changes to
printing and PrintPreview:

Shrink-To-Fit:

We now have Shrink-to-Fit on by default when you
print a page with IE7. This feature will determine the width of the document
and adjust it to fit on your paper. No more cut off right margins. Of course we
give you the ability to adjust scaling rates to really adjust it the way you
want it. 

Orphan Control:

If IE discovers that you are printing a document
that gets laid-out on two pages and the second page only covers minimal
white-space, we automatically shrink-to-fit the page to fit on only 1 page of
paper. Of course, you can manually adjust the scaling rate back if you rather
have it printed on 2 pages but we believe that we will save a lot of trees with
this feature. :-) 

UI-changes to put the user in control:

The look and feel right now is still very “bare
bones” but you can detect the new emphasis on user control. Notice that we
elevated the selection of landscape and portrait mode. The motivation behind is
that if content is much wider than suitable for portrait mode it should be easy
for the user to select an alternative. Also we provide now the capability to
turn on/off header and footers. Even though they provide useful information
(like origin of the page and page numbers etc.) they sometimes not wanted for
printable output (like images etc.).

We would love to hear your feedback on:

  • Currently
    we apply the orphan control if we detect that only 10% or less of the available whitespace is used. Does that work for you or would you rather see a bigger/smaller
    margin?
  • Shrink-to-fit.
    Does it work for all of your pages? Since we are relying on the horizontal
    scroll-able area to report us the width of the pages, we want to ensure that
    this will work in all corner cases.

Thanks

- Markus