WebDirect Printer Friendly CSS

FileMaker 14 WebDirect is very robust–much faster, more capability.  But it lacks the one thing common to all web browsers:  robust printing capabilities.  Mike Beargie of MainSpring wrote about this last year at Devcon about WebDirect 13, and I just stumbled across his series of posts.  The second concerned using CSS to print all existing layouts instead of making a whole new layout for each print report you need:

Printing functionality

One of the largest hurdles to jump over in WebDirect’s scope of operation is the printing functionality. Thinking like a Web developer instead of a FileMaker developer for a moment, what would you do to make your WebDirect site printable?

As a FileMaker developer, you would first jump to having a secondary layout for printing that already has the formatting screen-ready. While that’s easy and possible, a Web developer might ask, why not just use a style sheet that has rules for printing? Though it’s a bit of work in FileMaker, you can achieve a custom CSS that will remove formatting to prepare any layout in your WebDirect solution for printing. Here’s how!

What interesting is the fact that there is start of a solution already in FileMaker Server:  a file from a company called Vaadin.  I checked: It’s still there in WebDirect 14.

Beargie offers tips on modifying the CSS stylesheet and offers his modified file as a download. Nicely done!

Source: WebDirect Printer Friendly CSS | MainSpring

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