Print Preview in Netscape 7.1

Lately I have noticed that the "Print Preview" function in NS 7.1 usually won't work correctly (sometimes it does) - it may show just the first print page of a number of pages, or part of the first print page, or part of the second print page, but not the complete web page (it does show the corrct number of print pages, though). Has anyone come across this problem.

I am using Windows XP with 256 MB RAM.

 

It has never happened to me. Is this happening with several websites?

 

Yes. I am beginning to suspect that this is site related. In the same way that some sites don't completely work with Netscape (but do with IE), and some links to other pages won't work, maybe the print preview has the same problem. I'm surprised that nobody else has experienced it.

 

I've noticed this too, even on websites I've built and it's driving me nuts. I don't know much about how 'print preview' works, but this problem may have something to do with the browser and the printer driver for your printer. If you have 2 printers you'll notice that the print preview is different depending on which printer is your default (or the last one printed to while using netscape). This is expected somewhat, but I've gotton a 4 page document to only print 1 page using one of my printers, and then switching to a different one and it prints all 4. (the print preview screen is another story...it hardly ever really shows what the final printout will look like). So if anyone figures out what could be causing it, I might be able to get some sleep before christmas.....I've been changing stylesheets, tags, even putting spaces instead of tabs in. I think it is a problem with the browser, but I don't think AOL is going to hire anyone to fix it so someone has to find a workaround for it.....hopefully
if anyone notices an patterns, please let us know (unfortunately the sites I have are intranet....sorry no links)

 

I'm sorry to say this one's got me beat. I give up. In case anyone is inclined to look into this one, here's what I've noticed. It seems to be related to post-script drivers (which I don't know anything about, so maybe it's any print drivers) I've noticed that I can recreate the problem consistently using Acrobat Distiller, and on other post script laser jets. And if I set the fontsize on some text to say 10pt, distiller prints it as 12pt. (I use a windows machine). If I set the font size to 10px, it prints as 12px. There is a setting to change the dpi in netscape preferences (mine was at 96 for all my tests). I changed it to 72 and I can't figure out what was changed (even after restarting), so I don't know if that setting really does anything (on windows) at least). I thought at first, ok, it calcualtes where to make page breaks using the font size setting from the CSS info and then sends each page to the printer, but tells the printer the wrong font size so some of the data isn't in the printable region so it's lost. So I try to put in my own manual page breaks and while doing that I get it to print on 2 pages without losing any data and without using one of my manual page breaks...it broke the page correctly on it's own. So now I think it may have something to do with how it handles html elements and if it can break in them between pages or something..... I finally decided I'll just live with it and put my page-breaks is 'safe' areas and end up with a bunch of white space sometimes. If I break up long tables into a few shorter ones it seems to work ok and even calculate it's own page breaks correctly. I don't know if that will help anyone figure out whats up, but good luck. (oh maybe it's just the adobe post script driver....I've only been using machines that have acrobat distiller installed...may be something to look at, if anyone else out there notices printing problems like the one were talking about)

 

It was driving me crazy so I had to look into it more. If a page break is calculated in the middle of a table row that spans 2 rows (I don't know if it's only 2 or if it's 2 or more...I'm too lazy to figure it out, maybe after I get some sleep), then the printout is ******* up. Luckily I'm able to remove all rowspans in the pages I'm having problems with, so that's my solution. It doesn't have any problems at all if there are no rowspans (on my pages at least). I still think it has something to do with not being able to figure out if it should or shouldn't break certain elements across pages. I found a page someone can look at if the're curious.

http://www.time.com

This will probably work on most any page that uses tables and rowspans. Go to that page and do a print preview, if it looks fine change the scaling until you see the middle table disappear from the first page (you may have to try values like 81, 82, 83, 84...). Sometimes it will move to the second page, and whenever you see it move, check out the rest of the pages. Sometimes between the pages you'll see that parts of the page are completely missing.

So another workaround is, whever the print preview shows the page all ******* up, change the scaling until it looks ok.

By the way, I downloaded that time homepage and removed the rowspans to verify they were causing the problem, but the page was still was ******* up at some scaled versions, so the problem isn't just 'rowspans', but I think rowspans complicate the page-breakableness of the layout so they don't help. Hope this helps someone someday.

 

Jeeze Mr. forum parser, you make it look like I have fowl mouth. In case my mom ever reads this, I didn't type what it looks like I did.

(my mom doesn't even think '*******' is a bad word, and she would slap me if I said '*****')...well at least you agree with her on '*****'

 

Hi,

I had it happen after using a Print Preview of ANOTHER program earlier. After I notice it was happening in many sites that Netscape 7.1 Print Preview was showing only one page or one page and a long narrow blank white page ; that always worked before. I shut down and re-booted and then went back to the same sites again , and Netscape 7.1 Print Preview worked as it should. Not sure if it was just the Print Preview of ANOTHER program being used earlier or a combination of that and other factors that caused Netscape 7.1 Print Preview to show only one page. One thing I think I had done earlier was to copy and paste into Wordpad and had used Wordpad's Print Preview , before using Netscape 7.1 Print Preview , when it showed only one page , I may have also had run other programs earlier , but not sure. Not sure if this will be of any help to you.

RGSJR