Thread:Project:Support desk/Page printouts that actually look like the screen pages (colour, font, navbars, etc.)

This is really frustrating. I want to print some pages from our wiki, and I want the printed pages to look as they do on-screen, with the benefits of all the nice CSS settings designed to make the pages look pretty, and sophisticated, and cool. I want our logo printed top left (as it is on the screen), I want the tiny incidental footer text in Arial to stay tiny, and to stay in Arial. I want the navigation bars, and the background shadings, and the colours.

I want the printout of a page to be just that - a printed copy of the webpage. I want a printout that I can show to someone and say: This is what our Wiki looks like, isn't it great?

Unfortunately, what I get with MediaWiki when I try to print a page is a set of starkly minimalist, oversized, difficult-to-read black-on-white serifed text that looks like it's come from a website designed for a university math department in 1985, because someone, somewhere has decided that this is what printouts ought to look like. I can't seriously show these printouts to customers or colleagues, or pin them to a wall to give people info or show them progress on our Wiki project, because they look awful. Right now, if I want to hand someone a printed copy of info from the wiki, I have to copy-paste into a wordprocessor and reformat it by hand. I'm almost considering using Alt-PrintScreen to get a series of nasty low-res screenshots and manually piece them together with a bitmap editor (sigh).

I do understand that there are situations where you might want to suppress link indicators, and menu bars, and formatting and colours and backgrounds, and I appreciate that the MediaWiki folk have probably put a great deal of work into supporting these clever conditional settings that deliberately make the printouts look different to what's on the screen. I just want to find out how to turn the dratted things off and go back to the old assumed WYSIWYG default behaviour, where the thing that came out of your printer looked something like the webpage that you were trying to print.

So, does anyone know an easy way to disable the printer style overrides? I'd assumed that I could snip out the "print" CSS commands, or rename copies of the main CSS files as their "print-specific" counterparts, but either I'm doing something wrong, or there's some clever PHP in the background constantly overriding me, because nothing that I'm doing seems to be working (pouts). Perhaps there's a PrinterFriendly=off option somewhere?