I’ve seen printer stylesheets designed a variety of different ways. But any way you slice it, the most common element in a print stylesheet is usually the display: none; rule. Printer sheets are usually about printing less rather than printing more.

What I do is gang up all the things we don’t want to print in a single block at the top of the sheet. I always know where the “don’t print” stuff is, and removing another thing from the printout is as easy as adding the class or ID selector to the common display: none; rule.

Here’s the “don’t print” block from the Backpack printer stylesheet.

And here’s what it all means:

Screen version

Print version

No header, no sidebar, no utility links, etc. Just the content in the page. Clean and clear.