Finally - CSS for Printing

It seems like it’s taken forever. I don’t know how many times I’ve struggled with web apps that I wrote for the ambulance corps to try and get printed output correct. I’ve done everything from generating PDFs, doing screen captures of a browser and printing as a PDF, to things as crazy as trying to print schedules directly from the server, where they’re setup as postscript.

I just happened to be going through my news in Google Reader and found some interesting W3C draft standards for CSS Print Profiles and CSS3 Paged Media Module. Finally, after waiting for literally years, there will (from the way it looks) be a way for me to specify, in CSS, the page size - and more importantly, orientation - and have something print correctly.

Perhaps the end of me having to manually print ambulance corps rosters, and then set the print settings back to landscape and 73% scaling for the schedule, are finally going to be over!

C’mon, Mozilla, I’m counting on a quick implementation once they’re finalized.