“Tim Bray is having trouble with print stylesheets”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/02/Print
alas, I can’t find any contact info on his site, so I’ll just make some notes here for the time being and maybe look for that later. (I’m one to talk, right?)
1) it seems to me that almost all browsers have issues with background images/colors and printing. in IE, there’s a checkbox in options which is checked off by default that controls whether backgrounds are printed. it’s generally safer just to go with a dark color and give up on a background image. (those of us who occasionally use b&w laser printers will thank you.)
2) setting multiple alternate stylesheets is a weird, weird business. I wish I could remember exactly how that came out in the css-discuss list, but it’d be a pain in the ass to hunt for now. I’d go back to media=”print” and just bite the bullet and override all the bits you don’t want from the screen stylesheet. in the long run, it comes out much less funky. so to speak. (especially since in my copy of mozilla, the page loaded completely unstyled!)
3) I’m vaguely confused by some of the styles in the print stylesheet…once you’ve declared something as display: none; there’s really no need to add any other styles for that element (or whatever).
then again, IANASW(I am not a stylesheet wizard). or maybe I am…it’s hard to tell, some days.