Printing a Sheet

Every other theme treats printing as an export: a stylesheet bolted on at the end that hides the navigation and hopes for the best. That order is wrong here. A drawing is a printed artefact first and a screen artefact second, so the question is not what to strip for paper — it is what the sheet was always meant to look like once it got there.

What survives

The frame, the title block and the rules: everything that makes the page identifiable as a document rather than a printout of a web page. The title block prints heavier than it renders, not lighter, because on paper it is doing the job it was drawn for — stating what the sheet is, who drew it and when, to someone holding it away from any screen.

The furniture

The graph substrate goes, because on paper the reader’s own sheet is the substrate and a printed grid is just ink. The scheme is forced light whatever the reader chose, since paper has one ground. Anything that cannot be actioned with a pen goes with it — the header, the zone rail, the contents, the share row, the theme toggle. A button on paper is a black box pointing at nothing.

What is protected is the furniture as much as the content. A title block cut in half by a page break is a sheet that has lost its name, so it is in the same break-inside: avoid list as the code blocks, the tables and the figures.

The links

A link’s destination is invisible on paper, so external ones print theirs after the text. Internal links do not: a path that only resolves inside the site is noise in a margin, and the reader holding the page has already got the sheet that matters.

Code wraps rather than running off the edge. That is the one place the reading column gives up its rule about not wrapping command blocks — a line cut off by the paper is worse than a line folded onto the next one, and paper has no horizontal scroll.