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adamwulf / Columnizer-jQuery-Plugin

The Columnizer jQuery Plugin will automatically layout your content in newspaper column format. You can specify either column width or a static number of columns. And, of course, it’s easy to use!
http://welcome.totheinter.net/columnizer-jquery-plugin/
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When printing (or using print preview) the columization changes #137

Closed ptmahoney closed 10 years ago

ptmahoney commented 10 years ago

This is a difficult one to explain, and I suspect there is not answer :-(

Columnizer is working beautifully. Here is the bottom of one of my paginated and columnized pages:

ie_100pc-view-window

But when I do a print preview this same section of output is rendered thus:

ie_100pc-print-preview

This is a mild example. It can be much worse depending on the text.

What to do? I'm guessing that, due to resolution changes, the DIV/Text sizes are very slightly different. But the JavaScript is not re-run when you select print preview, so the text is not re-columnized, but is simply re-flowed within the new DIV size.

I would be most grateful if someone could give a clear explanation of what is going on and what can be done about it.

adamwulf commented 10 years ago

Yeah, my first guess is the same as yours - that the div is being resized to fit the width of the page, but since the content isn't re-columnized as well it ends up awkwardly spaced.

What happens if you force that div to be much thinner, so that it doesn't need to be resized when printing? doing that could at least verify that was the problem.

If that turns out to be the issue, one possibility would be to keep uncolumnized text in a display:none div. Then have a separate stylesheet for printers. That print-only stylesheet would unhide the uncolumnized text and hide the columnized text.

ptmahoney commented 10 years ago

The layout is specifically sized for printing on A4, with page margins set up in IE to be 10,10,10,10.

I have found something out though. When viewing the output in the browser the zoom was set at 125%, due to the resolution of my screen. If I changed the zoom, the output showed the same symptoms as when printing until I did a refresh. So I'm now getting much better results by ensuring the browser zoom is 100% before I print.

adamwulf commented 10 years ago

glad to hear it!