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Thread: Textarea content cropped when printed

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Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)

From: steven
Date: Tue, Nov 23 2010 5:27AM
Subject: Textarea content cropped when printed
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I've been trawling the web and I have yet to find a workable solution for
stopping textarea (or input) field content from being cropped when printed,
if the content itself is larger than the allotted field.

Has anybody come across this and found a good solution?

Regards,

Steven

From: Michael.Moore@dars.state.tx.us
Date: Tue, Nov 23 2010 7:51AM
Subject: Re: Textarea content cropped when printed
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PDF offers a solution if you make the field expandable. We have confirmed that this is supported for PDFs created with Acrobat Professional 9 when using NVDA or JFW 9+. MS Word forms will also expand and are easy to make accessible. I don't know of a solution in HTML but it may be possible to use JS to extract the content and place in a div with paragraphs for printing.

Mike Moore

-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of steven
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 6:27 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] Textarea content cropped when printed

I've been trawling the web and I have yet to find a workable solution for
stopping textarea (or input) field content from being cropped when printed,
if the content itself is larger than the allotted field.

Has anybody come across this and found a good solution?

Regards,

Steven

From: steven
Date: Tue, Nov 23 2010 8:54AM
Subject: Re: Textarea content cropped when printed
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Hi Mike,

Apologies for not stipulating that I was looking for a html solution.
Javascript is seeming like the only viable way to me too. Shame that there
is so much effort being put into CSS3 and HTML5 that such things get through
the net.

Regards,

Steven





-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Sent: 23 November 2010 14:51
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Textarea content cropped when printed

PDF offers a solution if you make the field expandable. We have confirmed
that this is supported for PDFs created with Acrobat Professional 9 when
using NVDA or JFW 9+. MS Word forms will also expand and are easy to make
accessible. I don't know of a solution in HTML but it may be possible to use
JS to extract the content and place in a div with paragraphs for printing.

Mike Moore

-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of steven
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 6:27 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] Textarea content cropped when printed

I've been trawling the web and I have yet to find a workable solution for
stopping textarea (or input) field content from being cropped when printed,
if the content itself is larger than the allotted field.

Has anybody come across this and found a good solution?

Regards,

Steven

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Tue, Nov 23 2010 9:03AM
Subject: Re: Textarea content cropped when printed
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steven wrote:

> I've been trawling the web and I have yet to find a workable solution
> for stopping textarea (or input) field content from being cropped
> when printed, if the content itself is larger than the allotted field.

There is no satisfactory way to guarantee that all of the contents of a form
get printed. Forms aren't really suitable for printing. You can use CSS to
suggest larger width and height for a textarea or input field on print, e.g.
@media print { textarea { width: 100%; height: 20em; } }
but setting the height is really guesswork and may still result in
truncation (or excessive amount of empty space).

The best approach is to make the server-side form handler echo back the data
it gets, so that the user can then conveniently print or save that data.
This is useful for many reasons - people often want a record of what they
have sent. It might be a good idea to say on the form page, probably at the
end, something like "When you have submitted the data, you will get a page
containing all the data. You can then save or print it for your reference."
Otherwise people may try to print the page in vain, getting truncated texts
etc.

(Replace "submitted the data" by something that describes what the form
really is for, like "sent your application".)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

From: steven
Date: Tue, Nov 23 2010 9:15AM
Subject: Re: Textarea content cropped when printed
← Previous message | No next message

I really like your informative message approach, Yucca. I will look at
integrating something of this ilk.



-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
Sent: 23 November 2010 15:57
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Textarea content cropped when printed

steven wrote:

> I've been trawling the web and I have yet to find a workable solution
> for stopping textarea (or input) field content from being cropped
> when printed, if the content itself is larger than the allotted field.

There is no satisfactory way to guarantee that all of the contents of a form

get printed. Forms aren't really suitable for printing. You can use CSS to
suggest larger width and height for a textarea or input field on print, e.g.
@media print { textarea { width: 100%; height: 20em; } }
but setting the height is really guesswork and may still result in
truncation (or excessive amount of empty space).

The best approach is to make the server-side form handler echo back the data

it gets, so that the user can then conveniently print or save that data.
This is useful for many reasons - people often want a record of what they
have sent. It might be a good idea to say on the form page, probably at the
end, something like "When you have submitted the data, you will get a page
containing all the data. You can then save or print it for your reference."
Otherwise people may try to print the page in vain, getting truncated texts
etc.

(Replace "submitted the data" by something that describes what the form
really is for, like "sent your application".)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/