Text chopped on right when printing web page

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I’m finding occasionally when I want to print something from a web page that part of the page at the right while fully visible on screen is chopped off on the printed paper copy.

Here’s an example My link – The image at the top of this PDF shows a screen capture of a portion of the web page. Note the section in red. The next two images show the results when the web page is printed to paper (a two page document) – the same chopped results show in print preview. Everything on the web page printed fine in this case except the red text portion in which a portion of each line at the right is missing. .

If it matters (although I can’t see that it would), I am using Vista Home Premium, Internet Explorer 8, and a 19″ widescreen monitor at 1440×900 resolution.

Does anyone know why this is happening and is there a fix? It’s rather a nuisance sometimes when trying to print from the web.

I just remotely logged into my office computer to see if the same thing was happening there and when I brought this web page up in print preview mode it showed everything fine – no chopped off text. This section of red text apparently word wraps depending on the screen resolution. My office screen is 1024×768. I changed my home screen resolution temporarily to 1024×768 but made no change to the text – still chopped (and the screen looked terrible at that resolution – everything too big.) I do seem to remember seeing similar results in the past on some web pages I printed at work.

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That’s always been a problem with IE.

I use Bullzip and print the page to a PDF file.

Just google bull zip and you’ll find it.
I use the freeware version.

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I use Bullzip and print the page to a PDF file.

I’m not sure how this helps the poster. Does Bullzip independently resize print jobs, or do you use it as a kind of print preview?

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I’m finding occasionally when I want to print something from a web page that part of the page at the right while fully visible on screen is chopped off on the printed paper copy.

What version of IE are you using? At least since version 7 there has a been a “shrink to fit” option that resolves this issue for most pages (pages where the author used a wide fixed width). If you use Print Preview, you can see how 100%, Shrink to Fit, and other percentages alter the print job. (Shrink-to-fit does not work on every page: some authors specify a width using percentages that add to more than 100%, so they will always stick out into the margin.)

In this case (eBay page), you can see by narrowing the window that it has a hard width on the description: you get a horizontal scrollbar once you have decreased the width to a certain point. In Print Preview, you need to get down to about 65% to print the entire description in portrait view, which makes all the other text tiny. Depending on your requirements, you might be able to print in landscape mode, or you might prefer to “hack” the page to force the description to wrap normally. That obviously takes some digging under the covers which can be time-consuming. It’s very useful to have a tool like the IE Developer Toolbar (built-in to IE8, downloadable for IE7) to tweak the page.

But I think the bottom line is to use Print Preview regularly before printing to avoid (or at least anticipate) this problem.

Edit: Actually, the other parts of the page also have a minimum width, too, but it’s narrower than the description for some reason.

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