Preventing printing

Does anybody have any ideas on how I can prevent users from printing a web page? The best idea I've had so far is to use CSS to specify a style sheet that either prints white on white or simply hides all content for media="print". Any other ideas - even browser or platform specific is fine since 90+% of the users use IE on Windows.

A more difficult problem is stopping people from capturing the screen and using that to print. Any ideas for that?

javascripts onBeforePrint might help with the first problem:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/events/onbeforeprint.asp

(although with the example there you would want to swap the onBeforePrint to hide divs, while the onAfterPrint shows them again).

I was hoping to be able to return false with the event handler to cancel the print - but couldn't see if it was possible - might be worth a try...

As to the screen grab - dunno :laugh:

CSS is probably your best way - try this:



and then in noprint.css have the following:



I've not tested this, but reckon it should work - let me know how you get on!

cheers

Also - just googled and found this commercial product that says it prevents screen grabs too.


http://www.artistscope.com/techniques.htm