That said, the automagic printable version does seem to be incredibly non-intuitive to people. Unfortunately, I can't think of a convenient way of saying "contrary to what you might think, this page will look OK printed" other than implying the exact opposite (with a "printable version" link or somesuch). I believe last time this was mentioned, there were suggestions of having a javascript "Print" or "Print preview" link somewhere, which might give the right impression, but no decent implementation was found (especially the latter seems to have no easy solution). Anybody fancy trying to take this idea any further?
I like to put a 'Printable Version' link on pages even if they actually will print exactly as the normal pages. Usually I use the same URL for the current page and just add ?print to the end. The only difference usually is that I use a little Javascript to pop up a print dialog box automaticlly for the print version. Sometimes I do make minor template changes for the printable versions too. If I think I want to change things that might be harder to do with just CSS.