Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Make any web page printer friendly

Take a moment to relax, perhaps grab a cup of tea, and picture the following scenario.  You've stumbled upon a brilliant article, on the internet, containing some of the most relevant information on a particular subject of your choice, and your only wish is to share said information with your friend, who just happens to have no internet connection, or a computer.  What do you do?


Like most people, you'll probably attempt to print the article directly from your web browser, hoping that the layout stays true to the original web page design.  Most of the time, however, one is sorely let down by the quality of the printed material.  While the article is originally only about a page long, the printout might consist of five pages of advertisements, blank spaces, weird web code or some other useless data.  Sometimes the article itself doesn't print properly at all, because of the web design limitations, and sometimes you simply don't want to include all the images contained therein.

It's very helpful when websites provide a print-friendly version of the article, which is increasingly becoming the norm, but i still often find myself in need of a way to make any webpage printer friendly.  Luckily, there exists a very useful web service, which allows users to turn any old webpage article into a printer friendly format, whether it is for printing or for generating PDFs.

print friendly

As the image implies, the service is called PrintFriendly, and it can be found at www.printfriendly.com.

To get started:
  • copy the URL of the article in question
  • navigate your web browser to www.printfriendly.com
  • paste the URL into the text box
  • click on "print preview" 
  • here you'll be able to modify the article elements, remove certain portions, and clean up the printout before saving a PDF or printing.  One can even change the text size of the printed article, as well as remove any images by a click of the mouse.
Give it a shot, go to www.printfriendly.com and paste your article in there.  See if this free web service is right for you.  It has certainly saved me a lot of paper and headaches.  Click on the print-friendly logo above to visit their site, and see if this helps you as much as it has helped me.





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