Here's a quote from an April 2, 2002 AP story as carried on Yahoo! News: "Ryan has not bee with wrongdoing." Here's another, later in the same story: "Falwell and others were behind the creation of false documents in the secretary of state's office justify pay raises…"

I'm not picking on the Associated Press. Read on screen, those two sentences made perfectly good sense—but in Yahoo!'s "printer-friendly" format, more than an little something's missing. More than you see here, actually: on the printed page, half of the second "e" in "bee" and half of the "c" in "office" are also missing.

By the time this column appears, Yahoo! may have discovered that its "printer-friendly" format is oxymoronic, but that will leave too many other Web sites that get in the way of the most natural thing a reader does with good Web content: print it.

Some DISCONTENT columns cover oddities, exaggerate to make a point, or deal with issues I find amusing. This is a case where I find the behavior of content providers self-defeating in incomprehensible ways. I'm bemused by the ways professionally-designed Web sites get in the way of printing content so it can be read offline. Bemused isn't exactly the right word. As a user, frustrated, annoyed, even "mad as heck" all come to mind.

Why Printing Matters
I can think of three reasons why anyone would want to print Web content:

• They want to read the content and it's more than a few paragraphs long. The most optimistic claims I've seen are that people won't read anything longer than 500 words online. As one content-oriented designer (at NUblog) puts it, "the only people who don't print Web sites are those without printers."
• What you say is worth repeating. People want to save it to cite elsewhere.
• What you say is valuable—interesting or lasting enough that people want to save it for future reference or rereading.

*Running off the edge and having no printer-friendly option. That happens at Holt Uncensored, a text-oriented site about independent bookstores, publishing, and related topics. As with most such sites, it's also hard to read onscreen unless you have a high-resolution display and turn off left-hand control panels. Just today, working on a copyright cluster for Cites & Insights, I wound up at digital media association, www.digmedia.org—and there goes the text, right off the edge of the page (far enough that I can't make sense of the printed results).
Dark backgrounds on printed versions, which not only waste toner or ink, but also make reading difficult. More than one book-related *site falls into this trap, even though the proprietors, of all people, should know better. The sites are hard to read onscreen as well, so maybe these writers just don't really want to be read.
*Light text and forced-small text that prints out that way. I know designers don't like normal-sized text to mess up the site's look, but does that justify expecting users to read text that prints at less than nine points?

When I encounter these problems, I can be charitable and assume that nobody at the site has ever tried printing any of it out. Or I can be less charitable (and more like the average browser) and assume that the site proprietors just don't care about readers.

Major Annoyances and Minor Peculiarities
A professional society puts the entire text of a book on the Web, one chapter per file, ready for printing—but then there's a wide black bar down the left side of every printed page and the pages are in sans, even though serif text is known to be much more readable in print form.

"Printer-friendly" versions show up with huge color ads inserted in the midst of the text, just in case we didn't see the ad on the screen. There goes half a buck worth of ink if we're using inkjet printers, which will certainly inspire me to purchase said product.

Some multipage articles offer printer formats, but only if you request print for each online page, one at a time—even though the articles are ten pages or longer and require full reading to make sense.

Hello, Jakob Nielsen, usability guru: In your infinite wisdom, you must think we're all children. Your Alertbox forces us to read oversize sans type, and we get the same ugly, paper wasting type on the printed page. (Just one more reason not to be too concerned about your "authoritative announcements.")

A beautifully-designed combination Webzine and blog prints out feature articles in clean, standard-size, justified serif type—but three-color (or gray and black on a laser printer) stripes across the top of each page obscure portions of the text.

Your site offers printer-friendly versions, and they work—but the resulting pages don't show where the copy came from. The URL is obscure (because it's a printable version) and you've left off clear source identification. That was a wonderful article I just reviewed a week later; too bad I'm not quite sure where it came from or when it originally appeared.

I could go on, and likely so could many readers. We all make little mistakes, but some of these also strike me as cases where the "content people" have never actually used the site or at least never actually printed from it.

Getting it Better; Getting it Right
At one point, the Journal of Electronic Publishing yielded printouts of its lengthy articles with light, hard-to-read text and some of the other problems noted earlier. There's still a narrow gray bar down the left margin, but these days the printed articles are otherwise clean, clear, and carefully identified. A fair number of other sites have also cleaned up their acts. Of the content-heavy sites I visit frequently, more do it well than do it badly—which makes the mistakes stand out all the more.

The NUblog article mentioned earlier offers a few hints for good printable pages; it's easy enough to find good advice elsewhere. I wouldn't trust advice from sites that don't yield good printable pages, but the fundamentals seem clear enough. Make the text (or printer-friendly version) monochrome (unless the color serves a specific purpose). Leave out the ads; we've seen them. Label pages clearly, with who you are, when the content appeared, and the original URL. Let the browser flow text: turn off the special features that force long text lines.

For goodness sake, let body text be "normal" or "medium" size. And why not let the user's preferred typeface prevail for printed versions? If the user hasn't made a choice, the default's probably Times New Roman, which works very well on the printed page. And if the user has made a choice of a font he or she finds highly readable (and that is the point, isn't it?), he or she will appreciate having that choice honored.

Most of this boils down to "strip out the funny stuff." There are few things simpler in HTML than creating a printable page. Why make using the content everyone is so anxious to get up on to the Web and viewed by as many eyeballs as possible so difficult?