best width of HTML/PDF document for printing

Question

I'm creating HTML documents for printing, by testing I found that width of around 650px is close to the margin. It's also good for PDF documents since I need to convert the HTML to PDF if the client wishes to.

Can you tell me what is the suggested width in px for a print HTML document, that afterwards needs to be converted to PDF? I know these are relative to the DPI and stuff like that, but there should be a simpler guide to this .... e.g. most of the sites that can offer printing of certain pages, have a fixed width of around 600px for the content.

Thanks

Solution 1

Pixels and Dots-Per-Inch are different beasts entirely, there is no simple way to translate from one to another. Obviously, then, I suggest not trying to do so.

Instead, I'd suggest using a print style-sheet and defining widths and sizes in relevant terminology for the medium, such as pt (point), pc (picas), cm, mm or in (centimetres, millimetres or inches)...

Solution 2

Printing is generally specified in mm rather than pixels. I would suggest calculating to the paper size you're targeting.

See: http://www.unitconversion.org/unit_converter/typography.html

Solution 3

The best approach is to make all the parameters configurable (with some common default values): width, height, and px/pt ratio. For US you may neeed USLetter, for Europe, Russia - A4. px/pt is a hardware dependent parameter. You can make it configurable to fit different needs. P.S. All these come from my 6-year experience on XML to PDF software.

Comments

[Adam Heeg]

Certainly a page width of 1200px would be less advantageous than one of 700px, right? Can you make a range suggestion based on your experience?