Should print preview target screen or paper (paged media)?

[mflorea]

Hi everyone,

XWiki provides a Print Preview mode that users can access with a link from the More Actions menu. At the same time, web browsers provide a Print Preview modal, usually accessible with the Ctrl + P shortcut key.

Question: do you agree that the content should look the same in XWiki’s Print Preview mode and in the browser’s Print Preview modal?

This wasn’t the case before XWiki 14.9:

(made for screen media) versus

(made for paper media)

I fixed this when working on the new browser-based PDF export (XWIKI-20157), by favoring the paper media (how the content looked in the browser’s Print Preview modal). So now, in 18.5.0 we have:

versus

From what I can see both Notion and Confluence favor the screen media when using the browser’s print preview:

So I propose we do the same and target by default screen paged media rather than paper. Note that those that need to print on paper can still add pagedMedia=paper to the URL query string and then open the print preview.

I started this topic after @ilie.andriuta reported Loading... (which I previously fixed for the Syntax Help in Loading... by forcing the screen media, but it looks like we should better target screen media by default).

Thanks,
Marius

[William-James]

Sounds like a solid approach to me. Thanks for looking into it!

[surli]

@mflorea

So I propose we do the same and target by default screen paged media rather than paper. Note that those that need to print on paper can still add pagedMedia=paper to the URL query string and then open the print preview.

So honestly I find it weird personally that a print preview mode targets screen media over paper, especially since we have export to PDF features. But it might be just me who is old school and only use the print feature to actually print over paper rather than export to pdf.

Now I follow you with trying to have the same de facto approach than other wikis, so it makes sense.

I’m just wondering if we shouldn’t have a preference option for this to users, but probably a very minor improvment. Or maybe just a switch somewhere when accessing the print preview? My guess here is that standard user will never change the URL for accessing the paper print preview if they need to…

[mflorea]

@surli

I’m just wondering if we shouldn’t have a preference option for this to users, but probably a very minor improvment. Or maybe just a switch somewhere when accessing the print preview?

We can add this later if there is demand from our users. For now, I’m targeting screen paged media by default.