[OPLINTECH] Firefox 3.6.9 or 3.6.6 and Hotmail

[Nathan Eady]

"Amy Wilson" <a.wilson at rrpl.org> writes:

> we actually get 3 pages, 1) a blank header page prints with
> From,Sent,To information; 2) The body of the e-mail prints on page
> 2, but gets cut off on the bottom; 3) we get a third blank page with
> no data printed and the second page of the body does not print at
> all.  Has anyone encountered this problem and know of any
> workaround?

This is a classic "this web page is simply not designed with printing
in mind at all" situation.  

In the case of Hotmail, the problem is caused, as near as I can tell,
by a combination of gratuitous iframes and egregious Javascript, both
of which are fairly common maladies on the web today.

There are several possible workarounds that I know about...

1.  Ideally, the website will offer a link to a printable version.  If
    so, this is your best bet.  In the case of Hotmail, this is
    currently housed in the list of options that appears if you click
    on the down-arrow to the right of the word Reply.
    
2.  Failing that, if there's a frameset involved, try right-clicking
    in the section you want to print and choosing "Show only this
    frame" from the "This frame" submenu on the context menu that
    appears.  If the frames are the only problem, this will usually
    solve it.

3.  Failing that, try selecting the stuff you want to print, copying
    it to the clipboard, and pasting it into a word processing
    program.  If you can get the information into a word processing
    document, you can print it from there.

4.  If you can't select any of the text on the page, the site's
    Javascript may be interfering.  (This is annoyingly common.)
    Try disabling Javascript and reloading the page.

5.  Worst case scenario, you can almost always take screenshots
    and print those.  I've only seen *one* case where a website
    managed to somehow hijack the PrtSc key and thus effectively
    prevent easy screenshot-taking in Windows.  That too could
    be worked around by installing a macro utility and binding
    a different key combination to take a screenshot, but it's
    probably not worth doing for as seldom as this happens.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library