Once I tried to convert a paper in ACM style into HTML [0]. It seems to work today. A few years ago, Chrome broke columns in printing mode.
What I still cannot do is the copyright notice, which for ACM style must be at the bottom of the first column (see example [1]). This would require something like absolute positioning relative to a printed page.
I didn't find a way to fix something at the bottom of each printed page with CSS either. Not sure if there's a solution today. I looked into it last in 2014.
A better reading experience. If you like to print articles to read offline, you can either rely on the publisher's own print stylesheet, or use an application like ours.
It uses the same formatting for all articles and adds columns. It's not a CSS framework like Gutenberg, the one posted here, which is intended for publishers to make their own content more printer friendly. PDF Newspaper tries to extract the relevant article content from any given page and then apply its own standard formatting on that and make it printable with our own printer stylesheet.
Yes, columnar reading is something special. Reminds me of ACM communication magazine. Though this must be a very small niche with web being so convenient - just click any link and read it...
The software itself is free to try at http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/