Created attachment 3326 [details]
patch for /lib/pkp/styles/rtEmbedded.css

I stumbled across this some time ago but it still seems to be an issue, so I'd appreciate some cross-checking.

Three CSS-Files in the OJS release contain an overflow rule for the main section of the html output:

#main { overflow: hidden; }

in

/lib/pkp/styles/rtEmbedded.css
/styles/rightSidebar.css
/styles/leftSidebar.css

Apparently this gets in the way of (at least) Firefox 3 to render the (=any) page correctly for printing. The result you may know from other web sites: since the browser can't determine how to split the (main section of the) document into (print) pages it prints till it reaches the end of the first page (without margin) and stops there (= tries to print it all onto one page).

With recent versions of major browsers this problem did not occur in Firefox4, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari. But Firefox3 is a very popular browser, and I think that many OJS installations may be subject to this problem,  particularly if they use HTML galleys.

Overruling these lines in a custom css file ("journal stylesheet") won't work. Apparently it's the use of overflow settings in sidebar(s) and main section at the same time that causes the problem, irrespective of what overflow option is being used.

So journal managers can't get rid of the problem by themselves but have to get help from staff who can access the files on the server.

Workaround: delete "overflow: hidden;" from the files, see patch proposals

medium-term solution: ? - if you want to keep overflow settings in different elements at the same time (but I'm not so sure that this is a good idea), there has to be another solution (aside from waiting for Firefox3's popularity to drop or a solution at Firefox's end).

Perhaps I didn't get the real problem, perhaps I overlooked something when searching for the reason of the printing problem, but the observation is correct. I just did another test with a clean and fresh installation of OJS 2.3.3-3 and some very tidy html galleys (and some pages of journal management, since those are affected as well).

Any idea/confirmation/objection to this or any alternative to my workaround?

(OCS may be affected as well, but I didn't look into that.)