Print stylesheet for phpBB2

The lack of a print stylesheet for phpBB 2.x may be one of the reasons why SMF forums became popular — each topic page has "Print" tab. Likewise, the default theme for phpBB 3.0 has an unobtrusive "Print View" button on viewtopic pages (although not on viewforum pages or the forum index). There are many new features in phpBB3, but the consequence is that the Administration Control Panel is hugely more complicated than phpBB2. I wouldn't recommend it to a newbie.

Before phpBB 3.0 was released on December 13, 2007, I did a lot of Google searching for a printer-friendly hack for phpBB2. All I found was a "Printer-friendly topic mod" (version 1.0.8) dating back to 2004. I unzipped the download and discovered it contained additional function modules, new template files and language packs. A printer-friendly mod doesn't have to be that complicated.
All that's needed is a print.css style sheet.

Print stylesheet for phpBB 2.x

To install the style sheet you'll have to change two lines in the "overall_header.tpl" and "simple_header.tpl" templates for each installed theme. The examples below are from the "subSilver" default stylesheet. It should be easy to locate equivalent lines in other templates.

Put the following CSS rules in a stylesheet named "print.css":

body { background: white;}
hr {
 height: 1px;
 border-style: none;
 background: black;
 color: black;
}
a { color: black;}
a:hover { color: black; text-decoration: none;}
th { border-bottom: 1px solid black;}
pre { white-space: normal;}
.cattitle { font-weight: bold;}
img { display: none;}
input { display: none;}
select { display: none;}

Open "overall_header.tpl" and add a link to the print style sheet. In the subSilver theme the link to standard style sheet is commented out and the the whole thing is included inline.

Add the link to "print.css". It must contain the media="print" attribute. Comment out the <style> tag, un-comment the original stylesheet link, and add the attribute media="screen".

Do the same in the "simple_header.tpl" template.

Print CSS default for saved pages

You could also include the print rules as an inline style sheet. Then if a visitor saves the page to disk as "HTML only" they'll see the print version:

<style type="text/css"><!--
  . . . . .
  CSS print rules
  . . . . .
--></style>

But it must come BEFORE the links to the style sheets. You would also need to add the following rules to the standard style sheet:

img { display: inline;}
input { display: inline;}
select { display: inline;}