Today, I tried to create a CSS file so readers of my stories can get a nice looking printout. Or so I thought.
The cast: Opera 10, Chrome 7, Firefox 4, Konqueror.
The task: Print plain text, two column, 2.5cm left margin.
Opera
Opera has one of the best print drivers for HTML. No other browser comes even close. But no support for column-count.
Chrome 7
Webkit does support column-count but not the official CSS3 style. You need a special attribute called -webkit-column-count. Cool.
What’s way less cool is the fact that the printer driver doesn’t support it. You can see it, but you can’t get it, baby.
Firefox 4
With -moz-column-count, you get two columns which make it into the printed page … but what is that huge left margin doing there? That looks like I get only 70% of the page for my text! There are three menus where I can “Setup page” but none of the dialogs behind them allows me to modify the huge print margins! What gives?
Konqueror
You’re kidding, right?
With the Webkit module, the print output looks mostly the same as in Chrome. With the KHTML module, I can’t even get two-column text.
Conclusion
The WWW was invented 1991. That was twenty years ago. Two decades. And web browsers still can’t get something right that bored TeX in 1984.
Posted by digulla 
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