Specify hairline thickness in CSS for printing

Question

If I have a print CSS styling an element with:

border:1px solid black;

or:

border:0.25pt solid black;

The lin

Answer 1

Thanks for your help. It would seem that browsers are just useless in this respect.

I've done some more testing and the conclusion seems to be:

• No browser is any good at printing point sizes.
• You can't assume users will see a width less than 1.25pt on a prinout.

I tested variations of the following web page, adjusting the border point size each time. I printed with 'fit to page' turned off.

  
    
IE 0.3pt
  

These are the results of the minimum printable point size and what it looks like compared to a printout of lines from InDesign. I've included a few other notes, too:

FF: 0.25pt, looks like 1.25pt. DIV width looks like it is 17cm, but because of FF's massive print margins the right-hand border gets cut off. It seems 16.5cm is the largest usable width. The BODY height fits the height of the page.

Safari 5: 0.75pt, looks like 1pt. DIV width is 18.2cm and BODY width is 19.5cm - Safari appears to be fitting to page even though there's no indication that it would do this. The BODY height finishes shortly after the DIV height.

Opera 11: 0.4pt, looks like 0.75pt. DIV width is 16.2cm and the BODY background only appears within the div - although the line of text, appears on a white background

IE7: 0.4pt, looks like 0.5pt (as does 0.5pt). As with FF, DIV width looks like it is 17cm, but because of IE's massive print margins the right-hand border gets cut off.

IE9: 0.1 works (and possibly lower), but still looks like 0.5pt. Otherwise same as IE7.