Paper Waster

How to unlock Paper Waster in Cheevos, open the browser print dialog, a wonderfully retro action to try. Worth 5 XP.

The story

Partner. You opened the print dialog. How wonderfully old-fashioned of you.

Cache keeps forty websites in the Stash that were built, specifically and deliberately, to be printed. They date from 1999 to 2006, back when printing a webpage was often the actual final step of reading something that mattered. Recipes. Directions. A long article you wanted to read away from a monitor. These sites had print stylesheets, hidden rules that only activated when a printer was involved, quietly reformatting the page to save your ink and your patience.

You just triggered the same mechanism. Somewhere in your browser, a page decided it might be about to become paper, and it rearranged itself accordingly, whether or not you actually followed through and printed anything.

Cache does not know if you printed the page or just previewed it and closed the dialog. He suspects the latter. He is not judging. He printed none of his forty preserved sites either. He just kept them. Sometimes opening the door is the whole point.

The catalog entry

PRINT PREVIEW OPENED Acquired: Opened the browser print dialog. Condition: About to print. Or thinking about it. Rarity: Uncommon. Printing from a browser is very 2008. Cache's Notes: The print dialog is a relic. Cache has archived 40 websites that were specifically designed to be printed. They are from 1999 to 2006. They have print stylesheets. They were made for a world where printing was the final step of reading something important. Cache finds them very sincere. He printed none of them. He kept all of them.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one is quick.

  1. Open any webpage.
  2. Trigger the print dialog with Ctrl+P (Windows or Linux) or Cmd+P (Mac), or through the browser menu.
  3. The achievement unlocks as soon as the print preview opens, whether or not you actually print anything.

Browsers apply a special print media type CSS stylesheet when the print dialog opens, which is why many pages look different in print preview than they do on screen: navigation bars, ads, and sidebars often disappear, while the main content reflows to fit a printed page. This convention dates back to the early CSS specifications of the late 1990s, when designers first got the ability to define how a page should look specifically when printed rather than viewed on a monitor.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache's forty printable relics sit in the same section as this achievement, a small shrine to a browsing habit that mostly disappeared once screens got good enough to read from directly. To learn more about the raccoon who kept them anyway, read the story.