Unfortunately, the printing capabilities of both Netscape and Internet Explorer are rather simple-minded, probably indicating that printing is not considered a high-priority feature.
In most cases everything will work just fine, however you may occasionally find yourself in a situation in which the printed output does not suite your needs. The most common example of this is printing a page with white text.
Each browser and each operating system has a different level of support for printing, so results will vary depending on many factors.
The sections below give solutions to common problems on each particular system...
NOTE: The information in these help pages assumes you are running recent versions of your web browser and operating system. Older versions may not have the same features, and thus may behave differently.
Windows & Netscape
The default settings attempt to reproduce all the colors in the page, including any white text.
However any background color or picture is ignored.
As a result, white text will appear invisible on the printout.
To solve this problem, simply turn on the Black Text option in the Page Setup dialog box (in the File menu), as shown on the right...
You can also activate the printing of full color backgrounds from the same dialog box.
Finally, note that the Windows version of Netscape has a Print Preview facility which you can use to check things before printing.
Windows & Internet ExplorerThe default settings attempt to reproduce all the colors in the page, but will automatically convert white text to black. So you should not have any problems in that regard.
To include backgrounds in your printouts, turn on the Print Backgrounds option in the Advanced tab of the Internet Options (in the Tools menu), as shown below...
MacOS 9 & NetscapeThe default settings attempt to reproduce all the colors in the page, including any white text. However any background color or picture is ignored. As a result, white text will appear invisible on the printout.
To solve this problem, you must set your printer driver into black & white mode, in which case the text should appear black.
For the common case of a PostScript printer driven by the LaserWriter driver, simply set the Color Matching option in the Print dialog box to Black and White, as shown below...
If you wish to include backgrounds in your printouts, simply turn on the Print Backgrounds option in the Page Setup dialog box, as shown below. Note that some versions of Netscape will print background pictures but not simple background colors.
MacOS 9 & Internet ExplorerThe default settings will attempt to print the page in full color, including background colors and pictures. In this case white text looks fine, however printing will be very slow and thus you may not want the full background to be printed.
To achieve this, you must set your printer driver into black & white mode, in which case Explorer will skip printing the background and will reduce all of the text to black.
For the common case of a PostScript printer driven by the LaserWriter driver, simply set the Color Matching option in the Print dialog box to Black and White, as shown below...
UNIX & NetscapeAll of the UNIX versions of Netscape print text as black by default, so you should not have any problems in that regard.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for the UNIX versions of Netscape to print backgrounds.
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