Declan Chidlow takes us on a really interesting tour of the often, under-reported world of print stylesheets, how to use them and also how to debug them.

Physical, absolute units

When we’re writing CSS, we tend to use relative, responsive units such as rem, em, etc, which scale based on user preferences and such.
Sometimes, I find myself forgetting that CSS even has units of standard, absolute measurements, but we have a lovely collection at our disposal. It is worth keeping in mind they aren’t always accurate on screen, but they usually are when physically printed.

At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting the same physical output everyone's familiar with.

This article explains some of the CSS basics that control how your webpages look when printed, and a couple of tips and tricks I've learned that might help you out.

PRINTING AT STAPLES STORES (U.S. and Canada customers): I've been really pleased with the quality of Staples prints, where you can get very inexpensive same day prints if ordering before 2 PM (with a small rush fee). For same-day/in-store 4x6", 5x7", 8x10" or 8.5x11" prints on matte paper: