I’ve been chasing this same print layout ghost for months on a few different sites, and it’s exhausting when the browser wants to drag every raw link and broken image into the PDF. What finally gave me some control was digging into my theme’s CSS and forcing a dedicated print stylesheet with !important flags on margins, column widths, and hiding the link clutter. I know you tried the custom stylesheet route, but one detail that tripped me up was that some themes register their own print rules late, so my media query only won when I added it through a child theme’s functions file with a late priority. The whole experience made me think about how much easier life would be if platforms baked print readability into their bones from day one. Funnily enough, I stumbled across a completely different approach while looking at https://www.gambody.com/ and saw how clean their model pages present for reference - no stray HTML or broken boxes, just the info you actually need. That inspired me to strip my print CSS down to basics: black text on white, visible image alt text, and a small note at the bottom instead of inline URLs. It’s not glamorous, but at least my printouts look professional now. Try rebuilding your print media block from absolute zero, no plugins, and test each property one by one.
I’ve been chasing this same print layout ghost for months on a few different sites, and it’s exhausting when the browser wants to drag every raw link and broken image into the PDF. What finally gave me some control was digging into my theme’s CSS and forcing a dedicated print stylesheet with !important flags on margins, column widths, and hiding the link clutter. I know you tried the custom stylesheet route, but one detail that tripped me up was that some themes register their own print rules late, so my media query only won when I added it through a child theme’s functions file with a late priority. The whole experience made me think about how much easier life would be if platforms baked print readability into their bones from day one. Funnily enough, I stumbled across a completely different approach while looking at https://www.gambody.com/ and saw how clean their model pages present for reference - no stray HTML or broken boxes, just the info you actually need. That inspired me to strip my print CSS down to basics: black text on white, visible image alt text, and a small note at the bottom instead of inline URLs. It’s not glamorous, but at least my printouts look professional now. Try rebuilding your print media block from absolute zero, no plugins, and test each property one by one.