"Printer-friendly" web pages

[tstorer -at- free -dot- fr]

The company I work for has several thousand pages of documentation,
currently available as PDF guides installed with the product, plus online
help systems. We're thinking of placing all our doc on the web at some
point in the future as HTML. One advantage of PDF is that it's easily
printable, whereas HTML is not practical in that regard.

I've noticed that many websites have a "printer-friendly version" button
on certain pages. Click it and the information on those pages appears,
apparently still in HTML, in a way that prints out neatly using the
browser's Print command.

My question is: how the heck do they do that? Is that just smart HTML
design or are there other tools and processes involved to produce
"printer-friendly" pages on the web? If it's not too hard or costly to
master, we could conceivably design online documentation with
intelligently planned "printer-friendly" versions of selected portions in
order to provide printability with our HTML doc and thus avoid having to
generate PDFs.

Thanks for any ideas,

Tom Storer

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