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beej71 | on: Websites Should Be Printable
While I'm on board with having good html structure that prints well, and I'm on board with hiding navigation elements, etc., I'm not so on board with changing the default font size or fonts in the print version.

I just made a simple site that didn't set any font sizes anywhere, and a friend of mine complained that the font was too small on mobile. Do I detect a lo-res screen and increase the font size?

I know a lot of sites do exactly that, but I feel it's wrong. The user controls their default font size on their platform. What if they'd already increased it, and now I'm just making it bigger?

What if they'd decreased their default print font size and then I shrink it again?

I think it's best to leave those to the user entirely.

ximm | parent | next
Absolutely, this is accessibility 101.

The one counter argument to this that I would accept is that users don't know about font settings. But the proper solution if for browsers to make it easier those settings rather than every single website having to add font controls.

cycomachead | parent | next
While everyone probably should learn something about their devices, the defaults you provide to users should be good ones.

Drawing a line can be hard, but clearly the basic font should be contrast-y enough so that most people can read it, no? The user can control the defaults of many things on their devices, but we shouldn't require them to change settings to have a good experience. We already customize websites a lot.

I think it depends on the goals of the print version, but people spend a lot of time picking fonts and styles so things look good on a screen. I take this as saying you should supply the same type of attention to your print style sheet.

wombat-man | parent | next
I had a professor who asked us to print source code for our projects for him to read. Looks like he's still at it. I'm sure he's being driven insane in these AI times.
batperson | root | parent | next
Wild, did he ask you to use a colored printer for syntax highlighting?
lelanthran | root | parent | next
I program almost daily with only bold, italics and grey (for comments) in my vim rules for highlighting.

I can read my code just fine.

unrented7977 | root | parent | next
If your beard is long and gray enough you can do syntax highlighting on the fly
wombat-man | root | parent | next
we only had a black and white printer, I don't think they would spring for color. Also, iirc he had a script he had us run to print it, so it' not like we were printing straight from the editor.
jamesmiller5 | root | parent
RIP vim `:hardcopy` :( .

For some harder C code (implementing `malloc` for example) my preferred debugging method was printing out the code and debugging it with a pen between classes.

I eventually realized being inside an editor gave me too much attraction to thrash with "just one more quick iteration & debug run..." and could actually end up more time consuming than being forced to reconcile my mental model with what I had already written by me double checking my assumptions.

Interestingly, some of my peers started picking up the habit for their own projects and we ended up having small "debugging" sessions by trading print-outs .

abhgh | root | parent
This is interesting. For a while I used to print out code and debug too - more due to resource constraints: didn't own a computer, and my high school's computers were available only for limited hours per day. I used to code my first iteration also on paper - so that in the limited computer use time, I could type in the code quickly and actually see it run. Wild times but I think it made me good at programming. My friend (who did have a computer at home, but lived far away) and I co-wrote a program called "graph generator" that could plot math functions, with me doing my share on paper and giving to him to type in :) This was in the Turbo C++ IDE and since GUI based programs were unusual (at least as a project in highschool - India, 1999) it temporarily made us popular. Well, wow, that was fun to reminisce!
what | root | parent
Why would you need color to read and understand code?
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kccqzy | parent | next
You were right and your friend was wrong for not knowing how to increase font sizes on mobile. It’s actually an opportunity to teach them how to change page zoom levels in a browser. (I actually have the opposite problem: many sites make font sizes way too large and I often need to decrease zoom level.)

The only exception is that the layout of your website requires multiple columns so increasing either font size or page zoom doesn’t work well. For example gcc.gnu.org is challenging for a mobile browser if one prefers larger font sizes. You are fine if you aren’t doing that.

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danadam | parent | next
> I just made a simple site that didn't set any font sizes anywhere, and a friend of mine complained that the font was too small on mobile. Do I detect a lo-res screen and increase the font size?

Did you use

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
That would probably be enough to look good on mobile too.
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