Printing web pages can be quite a headache sometimes. More often than not, half the page is taken up by advertisements, menu bars, empty space, and other information that a user just doesn’t want. You pretty much wind up wasting printer ink on a bunch of junk information.

One way to make printing more relevant to a web page is to use PrintWhatYouLike. The website helps you format web pages so that you can print exactly what you need. Not only does it make printing more efficient and cheap (because you don’t waste ink on junk info) but also it ensures you do your bit for the environment.

Using PrintWhatYouLike is extremely easy. Enter the url of the page you want to print in the box on the website. The web page then shows up with a formatting bar on the left-hand side. The bar has plenty of features, to optimize your printing experience.

The PrintWhatYouLike formatting bar has options that allow you to set the printing area for your web page. Then you can remove selected areas of the page, certain images, or even the page background. Finally, you can change the size of the text and the font itself, which is great for all those pages with hard-to-read text. As a bonus feature, you can combine more than one page while printing.

I tried out PrintWhatYouLike and came away impressed. It’s fast, easy to use and serves the purpose it advertises. Plus, it’s web-based so there’s no need to install an additional application. If you regularly print web pages, I recommend using the PrintWhatYouLike bookmarklet.

What do you think of this website? In your opinion, what’s the most efficient way to print a web page without unnecessary elements? Do you know of other similar sites? Let me know in the comments.

I had first thought of using the virtual OS of Windows XP on my PC to format these drives via a USB to ATA connector. And this will work. But as I am not going to be doing this on an on-going basis, I figured I’ll look for something that may be used by people without virtual OS software. And I found one at Fat32 Format.

This fat32format.exe program is small enough for me to store it on a web email account to access anytime I want. And it’s fast and simple to use. Just open a DOS CMD window and type "fat32format x:" where x is the drive to be formatted. Just be careful and never ever type c:

The only downside is this does not perform disk integrity checks. You’ll have to do a chkdsk yourself afterwards. Although this does mean it’s lightning fast in formating. And it’ll format up to 2 Terrabytes in FAT32.

This article has been contributed by Dante. Thanks a lot !

Puretext is a freeware utility that helps you in this special case. It adds a new windows hot key to your system (Windows + V) which removes all the formatting of the text that is pasted into your editor. You have some options in puretext like changing the hotkey to Shift + V or ALT + V instead of the default one. You are free to change the key that needs to be pressed as well, making it highly flexible.

Another option if selected pastes the converted text automatically into the active window when you press the hotkey. If you do not enable this the text is stripped of the formatting but not pasted into the editor. You are free to play a sound when this is done but I would advise against it. You may also auto run puretext with every windows start by enabling that option in puretext.