# Printer Friendly CSS

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899
**Category:** UX
**Created:** [July 8, 2015, 5:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899 "2015-07-08T17:45:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![tophee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tophee/32/73406_2.png) [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [November 21, 2017, 12:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/21 "2017-11-21T12:44:39Z")

</div>

Is it possible to target the print version of a specific topic with CSS? For example, if I have one topic that is a manual (ie. not just the first post but the entire topic is the manual, with different posts containing different sections of the manual), I’d like to hide post number, user names and post date (and possibly a few other things) from the print layout.

A workaround seems to be that I put that topic into its own category and then [target the category](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-we-have-page-specific-css-classes/47904/2), but maybe there is a better way?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 5:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/23 "2018-07-15T05:28:58Z")

</div>

When printing it would also be nice if the entire topic, rather than just the first 20 posts, we loaded.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 8:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/24 "2018-07-15T08:01:15Z")

</div>

What’s the use case for printing a 100 reply topic, exactly? Or a 1000 reply topic? Surely there has to be a limit.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 8:14am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/25 "2018-07-15T08:14:02Z")

</div>

I’m working with researchers who want forum data for offline analysis. One forum that I scraped recently included a print option which gave whole threads rather than splitting into multiple pages,which made the job much easier. In the particular instance it was scraping a public forum, but it’s often useful for those who want to analyze their own forum data.

I agree that some limit of posts would make sense (1000 perhaps?)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![zogstrip](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/zogstrip/32/512781_2.png) [@zogstrip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/zogstrip)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 8:18am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/26 "2018-07-15T08:18:55Z")

</div>

Why are you scraping when you can use the JSON API?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 8:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/27 "2018-07-15T08:20:58Z")

</div>

On the site I scraped recently there was no api.

I’ve written a discourse scraper before, but it’s nice to be able to easily reproduce formatting stuff that a scraper would need to handle from scratch.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Mittineague](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mittineague/32/114259_2.png) [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 9:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/28 "2018-07-15T09:21:21Z")

</div>

I helped work on a print.css quite a while ago. By eliminating useless navigation, post and topic actions, reducing print size, margins and padding, etc. we were able to get the twenty posts down to around, IIRC, 4-5-ish print pages. Dependent on post content of course.

Perhaps it isn’t as expensive to run off reams as I think it would be. But in any case it would be extremely unlikely that I would want an entire discussion. And if I did I would want it bad enough that I would be willing to print the paginated posts in a repeated process.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Falco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/falco/32/179432_2.png) [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 7:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/29 "2018-07-15T19:28:32Z")

</div>

> [@pfaffman](#):
>
> When printing it would also be nice if the entire topic, rather than just the first 20 posts, we loaded.

We do this already! Just press CTRL+P.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![riking](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/riking/32/170938_2.png) [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2018, 8:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/30 "2018-07-15T20:12:06Z")

</div>

And I’m pretty sure the print view is limited to exactly 1000 posts already…

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2018, 4:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/31 "2018-07-16T04:09:05Z")

</div>

Oh. I think I remember that now that you say it! Sorry about that.

Oh, and this is what I don’t like about suggested topics. I didn’t realize that was restarting a topic that was half a year old.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![bosal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/bosal/32/282180_2.png) [@bosal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bosal)
#### Post date: [November 19, 2022, 12:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899/33 "2022-11-19T12:46:19Z")

</div>

Maybe a stupid question, but how to implement this ?

When I put it in theme CSS I get:

#ember and .ember-view error

[Previous page](https://meta.discourse.org/t/printer-friendly-css/30899.md?page=1)
