Internet Explorer 7 to make Web printing much more convenient

Printing webpages in Internet Explorer can be a real pain and fortunately the Internet Explorer developers realized this. Their goal for IE7 is to dramatically improve the printing experience by giving the end-user much more control for printing webpages. In IE7 Beta 1 you can already see some of these features, but Beta 2 will feature even more improvement.

Here's a short look at some of the printing features of IE7 Beta 1:

Shrink-To-Fit:
Shrink-to-Fit will be on by default when you print a page with IE7. This feature will determine the width of the document and adjust it to fit on your paper. No more cut off right margins. Of course it gives you the ability to adjust scaling rates to really adjust it the way you want it.

Orphan Control:
If IE discovers that you are printing a document that gets laid-out on two pages and the second page only covers minimal white-space, it will automatically shrink-to-fit the page to fit on only 1 page of paper. Of course, you can manually adjust the scaling rate back if you rather have it printed on 2 pages but we believe that we will save a lot of trees with this feature. :-)

UI-changes to put the user in control:
The look and feel right now is still very “bare bones” but you can detect the new emphasis on user control. Notice that the IE developers elevated the selection of landscape and portrait mode. The motivation behind is that if content is much wider than suitable for portrait mode it should be easy for the user to select an alternative. Also IE7 now provides the capability to turn on/off header and footers. Even though they provide useful information (like origin of the page and page numbers etc.) they are sometimes not wanted for printable output (like images etc.).