The (New York) Times, They Are A-Changin’

Tuesday December 06th 2005, 2:17 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:Firefox, World Wide Web
Posted By: Matt

I’ve been irked for a while by the fact that printer-friendly versions of New York Times articles print using a teeny-weeny font that I can barely read. Naturally this is one of those issues that invariably bugs me after the fact, so I never took the trouble to look into what was actually going on.

I finally took the plunge the other day, and after some fiddling with the CSS stylesheet associated with the printer-friendly pages, I convinced myself that the culprit is some sort of Firefox bug. The articles, after all, print correctly in IE, and none of the behavior that I observed in Firefox (in particular, the fact that style rules associated with the document footer seem to affect the whole page) struck me as particularly rational. I may be wrong about this, since I haven’t seen this commented on elsewhere. Or perhaps I’m the only myopic Firefox user out there. In any case, I’ve now filed a bug so I guess we’ll find out whether I’m missing something obvious.

In the meantime, I did what any self-respecting Firefox hacker would do and greasemonkeyed the problem into oblivion. Turns out that removing the useless footer entirely did the trick, and required only a two-line script. If you’re having the same problem, check it out: New York Times: Print Fixer.

Update: So it turns out that this is an issue with the “shrink to fit” print option, which appears to be the default setting (see the Bugzilla bug referenced above for more information). It can be changed in the Page Setup dialog box (File menu). So the utility of my Greasemonkey script seems to be limited. I wonder if other people have encountered this problem and, if so, whether there is a way to improve the default behavior.

Update: It looks like the NYT has fixed the problem!


1 Comment »

  1. Hunh, fancy that. Thanks for the tip — this has been bugging me for a while but I never bothered to investigate.

    Comment by earthilng — 12/8/2005 @ 8:17 pm

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