A good place to start is by looking at what other Magento themes provide by way of print stylesheets.
The Default theme supplied with Magento, found at http://demo.magentocommerce.com, is seen by users when they first install Magento.
The store looks attractive for a computer screen, but it's not suitable for printing due to the following issues:
- There are large areas of dark colors, such as in the header, which will use unnecessary ink from your customers' printers.
- The three-column layout is unsuitable for printing.
- There is a lot of information that someone printing this page will not want—for example: POPULAR TAGS, poll, and cart features.
The print stylesheet provided by the Default theme styles the page's content to look like this:
The print styling for this theme is still not ideal for the following reasons:
- There is content in the footer of the page including the Report All Bugs link, which is unnecessary.
- The products as the primary focus of the page should be printed on the first page.
- The store's logo is not designed for a white background. Therefore, it looks ugly when a customer prints out a page from the store, which presents a poor image to those customers.
However, the print styling is more effective on individual product pages.
As you can see, the product photo and its details are now the primary focus. Although there is still some unnecessary information, such as product tags shown towards the footer of the page, it presents a much more printer-friendly view of the store.
Magento's Modern theme has similar problems with its print stylesheets, but a custom Magento theme can ensure that its print styling provides a better experience for customers.