WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Print Margins

for

From: Dagmar Noll
Date: Jan 28, 2005 8:00AM

Thanks to all who replied to my print margin inquiry.

Our service is very local U.S.-- a small, rural transit agency. Paper size
is still an issue though. The best we could do in getting all the info onto
the schedule was legal size, which isn't always somethig folks have around
the house. However, there is a second way to print the schedules. They are
also available as data tables in html documents.


> Since someone did point out that this is an "Accessibility" list,
> wouldn't the appropriate solution be to provide an accessible html page
> with both screen and print styles? Why bother with PDF at all?
>
> If, within that style, everything is relative and fluid, cropping
> shouldn't be an issue.
> Dagmar, you may find http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/
> helpful.

David Strong's comment really made me stop and think. Right now we have
schedules represented in many flexible data tables on one html page; I broke
up the large paper schedule into small html tables. The idea of putting up
PDFs was so that it could be easily printed in a concise form that was
identical to the paper schedule for folks who preferred that. Then I was
creating large print paper schedules and posting them on the internet. Then
the margin problem (exacerbated by legal format) came to mind.

So...now I'm thinking that perhaps the html tables themselves, since they
are very much scalable, should be the focus of my print efforts, since they
are already quite accessible?

In any case, if I stick with PDFs, I'm going to leave the scalability to the
user's program. Thanks for that.

Dagmar