Printing only a textarea

Question

I would like to print only the contents of a textarea element from a website page. In particular, I would like to ensure that nothing gets clipped by the boundary of the textarea as the contents will be quite large.

What is the best strategy for tackling this?

Answer 1

Make a print stylesheet where all of the elements except the textarea are set in CSS to display: none;, and for the textarea, overflow: visible.

Link it to the page with the link tag in the header set to media="print".

You're done.

Answer 2

Make a different CSS with media set to print

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />

http://webdesign.about.com/cs/css/a/aa042103a.htm

Answer 3

If the user clicks "Print," you could open a new window with just the contents of the textarea on a blank page and initiate printing from there, then close that window.

Update: I think the CSS solutions being suggested are probably better strategies, but if anybody likes this suggestion, they can still upvote it.