css backgound style and printing

Hi all,

While setting up a printable page (including css) - I was stumped to find that although any css background styles showed up on the screen, they were not printing. After trying just about everything in the code I looked at the advanced properties of the browser itself and found one called 'Print background colors and images' which appeared to be unticked by default in IE6!

One quick tick later, and low and behold - the page printed correctly (grr - Microsoft!)

Does anyone know if this effects other browsers - and is there a way to check the state of the property in something like Javascript? (Doubt if I could do it in php - pitty!) If I could check, then I could incorporate an alert telling the user what to do to get the page to print correctly if they wanted to...

Any comments would be great, thanks, J

It is not only IE.
In Mozilla, it is unchecked by default too.

I don't think it can be changed by a script.

look at @media css attribute.

it specifies to which media that css aplies (like screen, print, audio, projcetor, ...)

maybe it will print background if you specify @print css style sheet. (didn't try it)

more info http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html

Thanks all, but I already tried the css attribute @media - infact, you can also specify that you are bringing in this type of content as part of the link() function.

However no dice. The printer completely ignores the background settings unless that tick is removed!