I have clients that want to ensure that their pages print well so that people can save things offline for later, like recipes or instructions. I don’t print webpages myself, but I can see plenty of useful reasons to do so.

One of the issues when printing a webpage is that you lose context and interactivity. This is usually fine, as the site is probably intended to be read online anyway. But sometimes you want to make it easier for people to use that printed site, like still being able to find a linked page from a printed article.

The Solution: Print Styles for Links

Let’s say that you want to link to FixUpFox, my WordPress maintenance service. You can put https://fixupfox.com as the text on your page so that it prints properly and people can visit the site from their computer later.

The above works for print, whether you link it or not, but usually you’ll want to say something like “For site support I use FixUpFox, because they provide great service at an affordable price for unlimited tasks”. In that case, you’ll want to have some way to display that URL next to the linked text when printing.

Thankfully, there is a media query in CSS that is for print styles. Your browser will pull up that style when viewing the print version of a site. We’re going to use that to create our links.

Making the Print Styles

First, we’re going to make a media query in our stylesheet. This can go at the end of your existing stylesheet, or you can place it elsewhere as long as it loads on the page that you want print styles for.

@media print {
}Code language: CSS (css)

Next, we’ll add an underline style for links, so they’re easier to see among text in a printed document that might be in black and white. We’ll add that style to visited links as well to override any potential visited link styling already on the page for underlines.

@media print {
	a,
	a:visited {
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
}Code language: CSS (css)

Finally, we’ll use a CSS pseudo-class of :after on links that have an href attribute selector (so it’s not just an empty <a> tag), which is the target URL. We’ll add that target URL attribute of the link (the page that we’re linking to) to the content, after any links on our site. We’ll add a space before the link, and wrap it in parentheses to set it apart from the text. That code looks like this:

@media print {
	a,
	a:visited {
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
	a[href]:after {
		content: ' (' attr(href) ')';
	}
}Code language: CSS (css)

This works with any anchor tag that has a target link, even if it’s a text link instead of the URL. So when I type Ongoing WordPress Support and Maintenance, the printed version of that link will be the text of the link underlined, a space, and the URL in parentheses.

The following screenshot shows what the link looks like when we view the page in print mode:

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Finishing Up

You’ll likely find that you have lots of things displaying links that you probably don’t need, like the menu to your site, or sidebar content.

One solution would be to use the print styles to hide those portions of the site entirely. After all, if I’m printing a recipe out for later, I don’t need the navigation, header, footer, or anything else to print besides the content of that recipe. Another solution would be to target links in your content specifically, such as using the .entry-content class to get links that are only in your page and post content if you’re using a theme like the Genesis Framework.

Whatever method you choose is up to you, but I hope that this helps you consider the ways that you can use print stylesheets, CSS pseudo-classes, as well as CSS attribute selectors to add more context to your site, whether printed or on the web.

Thanks for following along and putting up with the shameless plugs for my maintenance business!

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