IE8 Printing Issue - Shrink to Fit is not Shrinking, right side getting hacked

Question

I'm having this problem in a Sharepoint Extranet site. Several long/wide forms and grids are getting their right sides hacked off when printed. In IE7, Shrink to Fit solves this problem. However in IE8, when I go into Print Preview, it SAYS it's set Shrink to Fit but it is not actually shrinking.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, in IE8 , shrink to fit is broken

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/printing-problems-in-internet-explorere-8-will-not/8ca793aa-1a0b-42cc-9ec3-720a595c3874

The solution suggested is not good enough because users cannot go and change every time, especially if they are non techie.

The solution for this is to change the compatibility mode. So in your page , if you set this

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" > 

it should work. This cannot be set through css

Answer 2

Try using Compatibility Mode. I had a similar problem and it seemed to fix it.

Answer 3

We are having the opposite problem; our pages display correctly in "real IE8" (or IE9) mode, but we have been having continual problems at a customer site where they report the printed page is shrunken when "shrink to fit" is set; so I have now tried running the site with "compatibility mode" turned on, and I see the pages being shrunken as well.

We've been over the site with a pretty fine toothed comb and there seems to be no reason for the pages to shrink, they are well within a standard page width.

This gives us a handle on what the problem is, and if others are experiencing shrinkage problems, maybe getting OUT of compatibility mode is the answer.

Answer 4

I had this problem in a company intranet site after we changed from IE7 to IE8. It turns out that there was a specific print-only style declaration that was setting the font size to 1.5em--too big for the printed page to work right. I solved it by changing it to 1em.

Whether or not you have a style set in the page that is causing a problem, you can try adding print-only styles to fix the problem, something like this:

@media print {
body {
   font-size:0.75em;
}
}

For me it didn't seem to matter, below a certain size, what value I used for the ems--as soon as it was small enough, the printed page started to display correctly.

The microsoft forum page provided by vsingh says:

Some webpages specify exactly where text should print on the page. If the webpage you're printing specifies exactly where the text should print, Shrink To Fit will not work.

This leaves me wondering what exactly it is about the stylesheet that is supposedly providing exact specification of location (and if anyone has additional thoughts on this please comment), because there isn't a single width, height, 100% or any other positional or locational css--just the font size. In any case, I was able to work around those issues by reducing the font size specifically for printing only.