Designing for Printing

[pauland]

Acorn I don't see where Xara says that the web pages will print as seen on the web page, so I didn't follow from your excerpt about Xara how that was a change.

I understand what the OP wants.

It's a real pity that we can't see the website.

[webinator]

It’s not about one particular website of mine. This phenomenon can be seen in most, if not all, of the template based websites in the Xara Website Gallery. For example, McMillanVideo is a very simple page, and if I narrow my browser to the approximate width of the web page, it prints centered on the printed page. If I widen my browser window to fit my 1600x900 laptop screen, however, the webpage is shifted to the right of the printed page. If I do the same on my 1920x1080 monitor, it’s shifted further to the right. This occurs in Firefox, IE11, and Chrome. When set to “shrink to fit” shouldn’t this simple page print the full width of the paper page, minus the margin settings?

[Acorn]

Part of the problem is the site is not a paper size (A4, US letter).
If it were designed with a page height of (1122.52px, 1056px) and width of (793.7px, 816px), then I believe you will not get the changes you are experiencing.
In Page Size options, set Paper size to (A4, US Letter), Lock page size and set All pages in the document the same.

Assuming you have gone for a Vertical Supersite to give your site that document feel, all should be good.

You then have to second guess what the user will print onto so you may have to present two versions (A4, US Letter) and advise, when printing to remove the printer option of header and footers and to have no margins.

My A4 test Supersite has pages effectively fixed at 1131px apart in height (20px gapped).

Acorn

[Arien]

I am planning to start a small business in Down Toronto. I wish to get some brochures printed. My brother suggested me Captain Printworks [Link removed by moderator], who provides printing and publishing services. But I found they offer both offset printing and digital printing. I am confused to pick one. Offset is less expensive but digital looks good in print.

[pauland]

Welcome to TG, Arien.

Why not pick up the phone and ask for their advice and an idea of costs?

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics Arien - Digital printing is like a more sophisticated version of a desktop printing. Usually inkjet printing, but often better detail and more vibrant colors and good for short printing runs. Offset and Letterpress are old established forms of printing and used for printing more items.

I have removed the link from your post as new members are not permitted to add commercial links until they have posted 20-30 times.

Do a Google search on these three types of printing and you will get a lot more information.

[Big Frank]

For example, white text on a dark background, prints badly on a printer

especially if as is often the case background printing is disabled
white text on a white background is really hard on the eyes

Are there things I need to know about WDP which will help me to produce web pages that print properly from all browsers?

in a word, no
it's nothing to do with xara products
its about browsers
the web is a visual medium not a print medium
hence you can print stuff from badly to ok to good to occasionally great
but the same page on a different os or a different browser or different default printer settings its always going to look different
create a 'download the pdf' link for people to be able to save for later and print it out exactly how you want them to see it

[Albacore]

Hi Arien if it is a brochure that you want to print as you stated from post #24 design your brochure for print in Xara using one of the standard sizes and there are many different sizes that you could use. To get you more confused there are also many ways that you could fold your brochure which would give your brochure a interesting layout. Content is king here and it is not like a web page where you have a home page and the other pages on your site you're trying to get the viewer to interact with you. In a brochure I have always found that my most successful ones for my clients business were the simple ones, single fold & double sided, (4 page). But most of the clients that used this design shop wanted the standard tri-folded brochure & of course double sided (6 pages) and for most of our clients this brochure for most business there was too much content.

A good guide whither to go digital or offset would be if you wanted to print off more than 2000 brochures then offset would be far more economical than digital. It's between a 1000 and 2000 there is a debate on which one to use so I would really talk to the print shop and get their advice. Also if you are using offset any of your photo that you use will loose some of the picture vibrancy due to the reduced number of colours that can be printed using CMYK colour processing in offset. Here are a few standard brochure folding layouts that are used