I've been complaining about this ever since the debut of Netscape 2, many years ago. But it's still little better. Am I the only one that cares? Aargh!

As part of my studies I am required to submit a portfolio of evidence of practice and research, including things like newspaper clippings, copies of meeting minutes, work I've produced and so on. All this is fine, except that getting a printed copy of research from web pages is a nightmare. Let's take today, for example. I found an interesting article at techlearning.com. Very appropriate to my current study, I thought. I'll print this one out.

Now, I'm not so green as to assume that any of these screen-furniture-encrusted pages will print straight away. So I looked for a "printable version" button/link. Hooray. There's one near the bottom of the page. I clicked this link, and up popped a new window with most of the navigation and junk missing. Just a top bar with some buttons and an ad or two. The text below looked delightfully simple, so I hit the print button.

That, of course was too easy. Why ever would I expect that a "printable" page would actually print all of the text? Foolish me. About 5% of each line, at the right of the page is simply not printed, rendering the article effectively unreadable. The reason for this, it seems, is that even the "printable" page is laid out using a table of width 795 pixels. Luckily, I'm HTML-savvy enough to save the source, go in, strip out all the frickin' table markup, and let the text flow to fit the page as Tim Berners-Lee intended from the dawn of the web.

Sure, then. I can work round this. But I have to do something like this for almost every page I print. It seems we are in the worst possible position, here. If pretty much any of the parties involved did something about this, the world would be a better place:

• If the web designers who make these "printable" pages actually tried to print them (duh!), they'd learn not to use tables, fixed-width CSS and other abominations for "printable" pages.

• If browser makers actually asked the OS/printer-driver for the width of the paper, and adjusted the printout to fit (like most every other application does), there wouldn't be a problem.

• If browser makers offered a sensible set of printing options to remove/trim "off-page" images and markup and let the text flow properly, there wouldn't be a problem.

• If OS/printer-driver makers provided options to squeeze or scale overlapping pages to fit the available paper size, there wouldn't be a problem.

A web page that fits comfortably on a screen just 1024 pixels wide, can't be printed on 8 inches of paper at 600dpi. WTF?

On a slightly less ranting note, if anyone has any good solutions (browser recommendations, smart web proxies that strip out screen-furniture etc.), please let me know. This really is driving me nuts.