"Honey, I shrunk the webpage"
Published: February 7, 2006
By Sandi Hardmeier
Note: This article uses screen shots and discusses features as they appear in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview.
Recent releases of Internet Explorer have a very strong security focus. Internet Explorer 7 continues this good work and adds icing to the cake by improving usability and adding new features, some of which have already been discussed in my earlier columns (tabbed browsing, Web Feed discovery (RSS support), and the Phishing Filter). In this column, I am going to discuss two other improvements to Internet Explorer 7 that have helped make my online working life far easier: the improvements to printing in Internet Explorer and a new feature called Zoom.
Internet Explorer 7 will be the biggest change to the user experience since Internet Explorer 4 with Active Desktop was released in 1997. The most obvious, and most requested, improvement to Internet Explorer 7 is the introduction of tabbed browsing.
Printing Improvements
Internet Explorer's printing ability has undergone a major redesign, with much to be seen in the way of new capabilities. Firstly, Internet Explorer 7 introduces a new Print Preview pane that is accessed by clicking on the Print button on the Internet Explorer 7 toolbar.
Access the Print Preview pane through the Print Button's drop-down menu.
The Print Preview pane incorporates new buttons and functionality to make life easier for us when printing a Web page. Working from left to right, the buttons on the Preview pane toolbar have the following functionality:
1. | Print in portrait mode. |
2. | Print in landscape mode. |
3. | Page set up (paper size, margins, and header and footer settings). |
4. | Turn headers and footers on or off. |
5. | Zoom to width (adjust zoom to fit the displayed page's width to screen). This option does not affect print size. |
6. | Zoom to page (show an entire page on screen). This option does not affect print size. |
7. | Preview multiple pages (up to 12 pages can be displayed on the one screen at a time). |
8. | Select content (this option only appears when a page uses Frames). |
9. | Print scaling (shrink to fit and Zoom). |
Commonly used preview and print options can now be accessed through the Preview Pane toolbar.
Shrink to fit
I am a very heavy Internet user. I conduct all of my research online; I communicate with family and friends online; I pay my bills and conduct all of my banking online; and I have multiple Web sites. In fact, I don't think I have needed to stand in a queue to pay a bill in years.
It is very important to me that I keep careful record of what bills I have paid, and when I paid them; if I pay through a company's Web site instead of through my bank's site, and I will often print out dozens of pages at a time when studying or researching. One of my dislikes when working with Internet Explorer over the years has been the possibility that it will cut off the right-hand edge of a Web page during printing. I must have wasted reams of paper over the years because I had forgotten to switch my printer's orientation to landscape before hitting the print button.
Internet Explorer 7 has solved my printing issues with the introduction of Shrink to Fit printing. Always selected by default, it does exactly what it says—shrinking the width of a Web page so that it will always fit on to your paper when printed.
No more cut-offs!
Tip: We can quickly and easily adjust the print margins for a page by dragging margin sliders using our mouse cursor.
New margin sliders make it easy to adjust print margins on-the-fly.
Print Scaling
Print scaling is also new to Internet Explorer 7. Imagine that the font on a Web page is too small to read when printed, especially for the visually impaired, or you want to print an oversized copy of an element on a Web page. We can increase the print scale of an entire page, or we can highlight specific portions of a page for printing and zoom in or out on that selection, making it as large or small as we want.
Internet Explorer can dynamically resize an entire page, or portions thereof, for printing.
You will see from the preceding screen shot that a new field appears when we select the Custom print scaling option. This field is used to enter our preferred zoom percentage (in this case 400 percent). The As selected on screen option only appears if we have highlighted a portion of the Web page using our mouse cursor before selecting Print Preview.
Printing framed pages
Web sites sometimes use Frames to display content. Frames are a way to display multiple Web pages in the one window by dividing that one browser window into multiple sections, and then displaying different pages in each of those sections.
My old Web site, http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/archive/index.htm, is a simple demonstration of Frames. By clicking on any menu option in the left pane, we can change the displayed content in the right pane.
Pages that use Frames have two unique printing options, printing Only the selected frame and to print All frames individually. By selecting Only the selected frame, Internet Explorer 7 will automatically resize the content of that one frame to fit perfectly onto your page.
Zoom
Sometimes we want to increase the displayed size of a Web page to make it easier to read, or to take a closer look at a graphic. Our options in older versions of Internet Explorer were limited to increasing the display size of text on a Web page by manipulating View, Text Size. Unfortunately, this does not affect the display size of a page as a whole, and sometimes the text would not change if a Web page was coded to force a particular font size on the user. If we wanted to have a closer look at a picture on a Web page in Internet Explorer, all we could do was adjust our screen resolution, save the graphic to our local drive and then open it in another program; alternatively, we could install a plug-in to add zoom-in ability to the Web browser.
In Internet Explorer 7, the new Page Zoom feature gives us the ability to increase the display size of virtually all of the content of a Web page, including its text, inline and background images, controls, tables and frames, advertisements, videos, and even some ActiveX components without affecting the overall layout of the page.
There are several ways to manipulate zoom settings in Internet Explorer 7. When using a wheel mouse, hold down the Ctrl key and then spin the mouse wheel up or down to increase or decrease zoom. Those of us who prefer keyboard shortcuts can use the Ctrl + key combination to zoom in, and the Ctrl - key combination to zoom out. The Ctrl Shift P key combination will adjust the zoom setting so that the page fits nicely on the screen. Ctrl 0 will set zoom to 100 percent. In addition, there is a status bar menu.
Zoom in or out when viewing a Web page.
Shrink to Fit, Zoom, Page Scaling, and all the other improvements being introduced with Internet Explorer 7 make a big difference to the overall user experience. When I go back to using Internet Explorer 6, I regularly experience what I call the "phooey, I can't do that with this version" syndrome, and I'm really looking forward to introducing Internet Explorer 7 to more people.
