Optimize Your Links For Print Using CSS — Show The URL

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When moving around from page to page in your trusty browser, you get the benefit of hovering over links and viewing the link's target URL in the status bar. When it comes to page printouts, however, this obviously isn't an option. Most website printouts simply show the link as text with an underline. What good is that?

Providing URLs for links in the print version of your page can be extremely helpful to the reader. Using a small snippet of CSS code, you can get printouts to display link URLs right next to the link text.

The CSS Code

a:link:after, a:visited:after { content:" [" attr(href) "] "; }

The pitfall of this method of displaying links URLs for print is that Internet Explorer ignores this code. If showing link URLs is critical, I'd recommend using a JavaScript alternative. If not, add this snippet to your print stylesheet to make your page print-outs more informative.

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Discussion

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    Cheers

  2. Great one.

  3. Great tips !
    Thanks a lot :D

  4. Good trick for printing a web page. But as usual, this simple tricks are not working with internet explorer

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  7. I figured out how to get around this not working in IE6 and IE7 by using jQuery and a couple of proprietary IE events to show the link when printing. Any interest in porting it to mootools?

    http://beckelman.net/post/2009/02/16/Use-jQuery-to-Show-a-Linke28099s-Address-After-its-Text-When-Printing-In-IE6-and-IE7.aspx

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  11. Steven Schrab

    This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

  12. Alok

    Is there something I can do as an end-user to print the links when printing a webpage? The CSS method (as well as jQuery method posted by Bill in a comment) seems to be intended for the author of the web page. How do I do this as an end-user given that the author has not done this? I could not find any Firefox add-on that does this.

  13. Alok

    Is there something I can do as an end-user to print the links when printing a web-page? The CSS method (as well as jQuery method posted by Bill in a comment) seems to be intended for the author of the web page. How do I do this as an end-user given that the author has not done this? I could not find any Firefox add-on that does this.

  14. Pravin

    Hi all I want to know …How can we avoid printing url and dates and page no from print window

  15. Robbiego

    Thanks for this simple trick. Works great.

  16. Alok

    This tool allows inserting the CSS into any web page when the page author did not.

    http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

    Checkout the option “More CSS” and use the specified CSS:

    a:link:after, a:visited:after { content:” [” attr(href) “] “; }

  17. Alok

    This custom CSS works still better:

    a:after {content: " [" attr(href) "]"; color:blue;}
    a:link {color: #800000; text-decoration: none;}
    a:visited {color: #800000; text-decoration: none;}
    a:hover {color: #000000; text-decoration: underline;}
    
  18. why not simply:

    a:after { content:" [" attr(href) "] "; }

    • Because it would show empty parens for anchors, try with the current page ;)

    • Then why not test if the link starts with http or a direct link without the starting protocol.

      	a[href^=http]:after, a[href^=//]:after
      	{ 
      		content:" [" attr(href) "] "; 
      	}
      

      This wil stop displaying all te other link types and the empty ones. If you don’t want to display links to mailto, ftp, javascript etc.

    • a[href^="http"]:after, a[href^="//"]:after
      { 
      	content:" [" attr(href) "] "; 
      }
      

      don’t forget the qoutation marks :)

  19. Chirag

    Thank you!

  20. Thanks for this article. It’s exactly what I needed to figure out how to suppress this on our site. Now at least I know what to look for in debugging the URLs being printed.

  21. Thats very good I hide it because my customers need print invoice without links:

    @media print
    {
    a:after {  display:none;}
    }
    
  22. What if I’m using relative links (including ones that go back multiple directories) as well as direct links (to other websites)? I’m trying to display urls when you print from my website, aquariumkids.com. Thanks!

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