IE8 Printing problem

Question

I have a number of customers visiting my website that are trying to print out a specific page. This page printed fine when they were using IE7, but they have since upgraded to IE8 and the page no longer prints correctly.

If they click the "IE7 compatibility" button in the toolbar and print, the page prints fine.

Most, if not all users that are reporting this problem are using WinXP, not Vista.

Unfortunately, I am not able to reproduce the problem on my machine or any other machine in my company, so I am sort of feeling around in the dark trying to figure out what is wrong (IE8 or my website code) and how to fix.

I know that I can add some code to my site to tell IE8 to force itself into compatibility mode with my site, but I'd like to find the root cause before doing that. If it is an IE8 bug, I'll go that route, but I'd first like to see if it is my code's fault.

Anyone have any ideas about what might be wrong? Any ideas on how to track down the problem?

Edit: More info from questions below:

• Url: http://rimscentral.com Unfortunately, there isn't much to show unless you are an actual customer, but I am working on a test page that would be more "public" to reproduce the problem.

• I don't know if the customers' IE8 installations are fully patched. That's an excellent question that I will investigate.

Answer 1

How does the page behave in Firefox/Chrome/Safari? If it looks fine, then you've hit an IE8 bug, otherwise you need to check your code. Although come to think of it, if turning on compatibility mode fixes it, then the problem is almost certainly in your code. IE7 is still very IE6-like in some respects, especially when dealing with nonstandard markup. (It also has some very screwy bugs related to zooming/text size, but I digress.)