Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

JavaScript print Events

By David Walsh on December 29, 2022

Media queries provide a great way to programmatically change behavior depending on viewing state. We can target styles to device, pixel ratio, screen size, and even print. That said, it's also nice to have JavaScript events that also allow us to change behavior. Did you know you're provided events both before and after printing?

I've always used @media print in stylesheets to control print display, but JavaScript provides beforeprint and afterprint events:

function toggleImages(hide = false) {
  document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach(img => {
    img.style.display = hide ? 'none' : '';
  });
}

// Hide images to save toner/ink during printing
window.addEventListener('beforeprint', () => toggleImages(true))
window.addEventListener('afterprint', () => toggleImages());

It may sound weird but considering print is very important, especially when your website is documentation-centric. In my early days of web, I had a client who only "viewed" their website from print-offs. Styling with @media print is usually the best options but these JavaScript events may help!

Recent Features

By Eduardo BouçasJanuary 5, 2015
Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass
I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...
By David WalshNovember 21, 2011
Page Visibility API
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

By David WalshMarch 3, 2009
Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery
I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with jQuery JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...
By David WalshNovember 2, 2012
CSS Transforms
CSS has become more and more powerful over the past few years and CSS transforms are a prime example. CSS transforms allow for sophisticated, powerful transformations of HTML elements. One or more transformations can be applied to a given element and transforms can even be animated...

JavaScript print Events

Recent Features

Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

Page Visibility API

Incredible Demos

Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery

CSS Transforms

Discussion