Roman printed a webpage to pdf document that included text and some images. I decided to investigate the issue further, and came to similar conclusions.

The following pdf printers were used in the test:

• Bullzip PDF printer
• DoPDF 7
• PDF Creator
• PrimoPDF

You can check out additional pdf printers over at the overview at Freeware Genius’s blog.

I have tested two different documents, first a Word document from SEOMoz, and second the forum page containing Roman’s forum post.

The results

Word document, original file size 439 Kilobytes

Bullzip PDF Printer: 350 Kilobytes
DoPDF 7: 317 Kilobytes
PDF Creator: 348 Kilobytes
Primo PDF: 512 Kilobytes

Web page, original file size 450 Kilobytes

Bullzip PDF Printer: 256 Kilobytes
DoPDF 7: 212 Kilobytes
PDF Creator: 240 Kilobytes
Primo PDF: 172 Kilobytes

The differences are not nearly as wide in range as Roman’s findings, but they may still be considerable. Especially the Word document differences are noteworthy. While Bullzip PDF Printer, DoPDF 7 and PDF Creator remain between 317 and 350 Kilobytes, Primo PDF breaks out resulting in a file size increase of 150 to 200 Kilobytes.

It is rather surprising that the pdf printer with the largest file size managed to create the lowest file size converting the web page. The three other printers are again close to each other, with DoPDF a little bit better than the other two.

Some pdf printers may come with options to reduce the file size of the resulting pdf documents, for instance by compressing images. All tests have been conducted with the default settings.

This test concentrates on file size, and there may be other factors playing a role for users, pdf quality a top one. A difference of a few hundred Kilobytes makes no big difference if the documents are stored on a desktop PC, they can however have an impact if the pdf documents are stored and accessed on mobile devices like ebook readers or smartphones with limited space and processing capabilities.

My suggestion would be to install at least two different pdf printers on the system for best results. Ideally two different printers, for instance one that utilizes Ghostscript (which many pdf printers do) and another one that does not use Ghostscript.

Have you been working with pdf printers? If you did, tell us about your experience in the comments.

Now people are beginning a wholesale move across to mobile devices, smartphones and tablets. Yet for some reason I’m still completely unable to phathom these devices still don’t seem to come with native printer support.

To make matters even more confusing, many modern printers have supported wireless connectivity now for several years, more than long enough to allow the mobile and tablet operating system manufacturers to pull their collective fingers out.

This constantly boggles and amazes me as there are all manner of things we want to do with our phones and tablets, from booking journeys to online shopping and email, where printing support would come in extremely handy. Yet, still nothing but stony silence from the major operating system manufacturers.

It doesn’t even strike me as technically difficult either. If you are connecting to a remote printer you will be doing so via wi-fi. The printer manufacturers would probably fall over backwards to add smartphone and tablet support to their driver-ranges, and it still doesn’t happen.

It’s not as if modern devices don’t have the storage and the processing power for these drivers. Many smartphones regularly come with at least 8Gb or 16Gb of storage and they’re now apperaring with dual-core processors.

So the great mystery continues. Why, unless we spend money on expensive third-party addons which may not even exist for your platform, are we being denied the one thing that was a cornerstone of the modern computing revolution? How is it that Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google don’t see printing as being either important or relevant to our daily lives?

It’s not often I write a rhetorical article such as this. There is, sadly, no answer to this question at all and no hope that we’ll get some any time soon. It’s not a subject that any of the major operating system companies ever mention, despite printer manufacturers no doubt chomping at the bit to get into new markets and modern phones such as Nokia’s N8 coming with USB ports.

So we’re left in a strange place where the whole computing market is moving slowly and inexorably towards new forms of mobile computing and, at ever-increasing speed, away from the home office, while at the same time needing to keep the home office around for the next time we want to print a booking confirmation or an email.

Personally I find this situation immensely frustrating;after all, how hard can it be for printer manufacturers to come together to develop a single universal driver that will do the basics of text and photos (which is all we really need) that can then be bundled by default with modern smartphone and tablet operating systems. Such a driver would connect to compatible printers via wi-fi and, before you can say paper jam, there would be your hard copy… well, you know what I mean.

I’m really hoping that this situation resolves itself before too long so please, please show this article to every influential person you can find. I’d imaging you’ll probably have to hand them a device where they can read it on the screen though :/

The original FlipBook Printer could be used to turn avi movies into printable flipbooks, which you could create for presents, projects or fun. Flipsuite expands the concept with a newly added video recording feature. It is now possible to use webcams to record video which then can be used to create the flipbook.

The main program interface launches in Live Camera Mode, users without a webcam can switch to the Media File Viewer to load a directory from the computer instead. FlipSuite supports many different media formats, including video and picture formats. It is for instance possible to load photos taken with your digital camera, or to load movies and capture screenshots with the built-in-tools.

You can furthermore draw a rectangle on individual screenshots to crop the image. Another, more elegant option is to use the Tools > Flipbook Printer – Just load movie option to let the program do all the dirty work. The flipbook software will process the selected video file automatically based on your preferences. This way it is possible to create a flipbook in less than a minute.

Flipbook Printer is an option lover’s heaven. The printing options alone displays preferences on eight different tabs, from designing a front and back cover to selecting specific still images at the start and end of the book to special effects, card templates and extensive printing options.

Then you have got the program options which are accessible via the View menu in the main interface.

Do not get me wrong here though: The program is not complicated to use. If you just want to create a flipbook you can do so in less than a minute provided that you have images or video files on your local computer. The options and preferences can be used to customize the result in every imaginable way.

Flipbook Printer Suite has a few quirks, the folder selection for instance is not really that comfortable. I also have not found a way to create multiple manual screenshots of a movie in rapid succession.

These are however only minor issues. If you want to create flipbooks then Flipbook Suite 2 is the program to do just that. You find more information about the software program and downloads over at the Donation Coder website.

The Firefox add-on Print Edit integrates seamlessly into the print preview page of the web browser, by adding an Edit button to the page’s header.

A click on the button displays the page of the website again, but this time with selectable elements. Here it is then possible to select elements to edit, hide, format or delete them.

This makes it for instance possible to delete advertisements, images, sidebars and other elements that are not necessary for the print out.

print edit

The add-on offers three basic editing options. The delete button removes the selected element from the web page. Hide on the other hand hides the selected elements. The difference between hide and delete is that hide does not affect the position of other elements on the page, while delete does.

Eight different formatting properties can be applied with the format command. These elements can be selected in the drop down menu next to the format button.

There are also comfortable options to select elements on the page. It is for instance possible to delete all elements at once except the selected ones.

Print Edit can save a lot of money, especially for users who print out a lot of websites and pages. Users who only want to print out text can take a look at readability extensions instead, which are easier and faster to use.

The portable software program hijacks the Windows Print screen and adds functionality to it at the same time. Pressing print on the keyboard will give the user the option to draw a rectangle on the screen to capture a part of it. Adding the Ctrl key to the procedure will take a screenshot of the whole screen while Ctrl-Shift-Print will capture a scrolling window.

The default action after pressing the keys can be configured in the program’s settings. It is for instance possible to open the internal image editor afterwards to edit the image or to open the screenshot history instead. The history lists a number of recently taken screenshots, by default 20.

Other automatic options include copying the captured image or the path of the captured image to the clipboard.

The image editor offers access to six drawing tools that can be used to add arrows, numbers, text and rectangles to the image as well as blur part of it. The crop, resize and border tools complete the image editing options that the program provides.

Screenpresso is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that should provide computer users with all the tools needed to capture screens and edit the resulting images. The image editor could use additional options like specifying the blur level or the compression level when saving images.

Windows users who want to try out Screenpresso can download the screen capture software from the developer’s website.

The service works by pointing it to an url on the Internet. The website will be loaded by Print What You Like with controls to manage elements on the website in a left sidebar.

The mouse cursor will automatically highlight elements on the website. These elements can then be manipulated in the sidebar. It is for instance possible to remove elements from the website, change the text font and size, fit elements to the width of the page or resize elements.

Print What You Like offers an automatic option as well which works well on some websites but not on all. This option in theory removes all unnecessary elements from the website.

The service is also offering a bookmarklet that sends urls directly to it making the process more user friendly. Alternatives to Print What You like are The Printliminator bookmarklet, Print Friendly or Green Print.

The Printliminator bookmarklet offers an easy way of removing elements from a website before printing it. The bookmarklet needs to be executed while the website is active. It will display some controls in the upper right corner of the screen. The main controls on the other hand are available with the mouse. Elements on the page will be marked with a red rectangle by moving the mouse around.

Website before optimization for print:

Website after optimization to save printer ink:

A click with the left mouse button will remove the active red rectangle from the website. This includes all elements that are contained in the rectangle at that time. The rectangle will be removed and if that clears a row in the page the remaining content will be moved up. It usually takes a few seconds to remove all elements on the website that are not needed for the print out. This can save a lot of printer ink especially if print outs are generated on a regular basis.

The controls in the upper right corner can be used to instantly remove all graphics from the page, to undo the last action, send the website to the printer or apply a printing stylesheet which will remove some elements and maximize the text to the web browser window. Printliminator should work in all web browsers that support bookmarklets.

This will by default send the screen or the window to the default printer in Windows. The settings of the program can be used to change that behavior in many ways. It is for instance possible to change the default behavior to copying or saving the screen, window or a rectangle among other options.

That’s however not the only way to access the additional features that Hardcopy offers. Hardcopy places a printer icon on every window title which when pressed will also initiate the configured action. Three different actions can be configured that are triggered by pressing the left, middle and right mouse button.

The main window of Hardcopy offers basic image editing options which can be useful to quickly edit the screenshot before publishing or sending it.

Probably the most impressive feature of Hardcopy is the amount of computer memory that it needs to run. It uses less than 2 Megabytes of computer memory, usually even less than 1 Megabyte.

Hardcopy is available for all Windows operating systems at the developer’s website.

If you want to print a webpage you are either stuck to selecting a piece of text, or printing the whole page as is. If you are lucky there’s a printable version, but this removes everything except the text, so again, not too flexible. Print What You Like let’s you enter a website which it renders for you, enabling you to remove any elements you don’t need.

The flexibility here is really great, you can literally add or remove any element whatsoever. You can select paragraphs and resize them horizontally and vertically, all content will get pushed along as it should. You can even change the text size and the text font.

You can remove all images and backgrounds with one click if that’s all you need, but tweaking is up to you, you can delete as much or as little as you want. There is also an option to add more pages, taking text or images from multiple sources, you could create a little web-book of your favorite posts of the week.

The features are really great and printing what you need has never been made so easy. Just a tiny addition, the ability to move items on page would have been nice. This is a great idea and it is executed very well, I recommend this to anyone with printing needs, in the end you might spend less ink on it, saving you money and helping the environment.

Their problem was that they always had to change the settings when they wanted to print a picture that they took with the digital camera. Here is what I did so that they did not have to change those settings all the time. You all know that it is possible to add additional printers to your system. What most users do not know is that you can also add the same printer again and configure it with different settings. What I did was I installed the printer again in Windows Vista.

This had the result that I now had two printer profiles. I started by naming them accordingly. One was named Print Text Documents while the other was named Print Photo. Since the profiles are independent of each other it was easy to keep the text document settings of the default printer and optimize the settings of the photo printer to print pictures in best quality.

No magic involved here, sorry. Whenever they want to print a photo they simply use the second profile with the name Print Photo. It’s theoretically possible to create additional profiles if need arises.

Purrint changes the default behavior of the Print key in Windows to one or several of the following functions: Copy the screenshot to the clipboard (default Windows behavior), save the screenshot to a file automatically and print to the default printer. The location on the hard drive where the images shall be saved can be selected as well as the filename. Purrint adds a number which is increased by one every time automatically.

The last option sends the screenshot directly to the default printer where it is printed. It is also possible to initiate a prompt whenever the Print key is pressed. This will then offer all three choices to the user and the user can make one or more choices in that menu.

I almost forgot, the file type can be selected as well. The default file format is bmp which can be changed to jpg, gif and png. Wonderful lightweight application.

The benefit of Print Conductor is that you do not have to open all those applications to start the print job which can save a lot of time. The interface is as simply as it can be. Users can add documents by drag and drop, open a list of documents that have been previously saved or scan a folder or drive for documents of the type specified.

Scanning a drive will add lots – and I mean – lots of documents to the print queue. A test drive on my applications drive added thousands of files to the print queue. The clear all button removed them again without further difficulties.

All printers installed on the system are supported by Print Conductor and their options can be accessed from within the software. Once the printing job starts a progress bar is displayed showing the complete status of it. This process can be canceled at any time in case something goes wrong.

Supported File Types:

PDF, DOC, WRI, WPS, RTF, TXT, XLS, PPT, PPS, POT, VSD, DWG, DXF, SNP, HTM, HTML.

via Techyard

A better way to print websites is to remove all unnecessary elements from that website before you send it to your printer. This can be easily done with two Firefox extensions that I reviewed. Elements are everything that is displayed on a website. This can be images, menus, background colors, advertisement and all text.

Most of the time the text and probably the images related to that text are important which means it is safe to remove everything else on that page. Both Firefox extensions – Nuke Anything Enhanced and Aardvark – can remove elements on a website to prepare it for printing.

Aardvark offers several additional functions that I will talk about later. Lets take a look at one of the pages at Ghacks and how it looks like if you print it if you do not remove any elements on that page.

All elements such as advertisements, the top and left menu, title, tags and so on are visible and will also be visible on the printout. Not a nice printout if you only want the text and title of the article.

Nuke Anything Enhanced:

The same article after removing all possible elements with Nuke Anything enhanced. As you can see all menus and adds have been removed from the article leaving only the text, title and images in place. The place however is exactly the same position as before which means that the whitespace where the ads have been is not used and leaves a large white area on the printout.

Aardvark:

This one removes the same elements that Nuke Anything Enhanced has removed with the difference that the text uses the whitespace from the ads that have been removed. This is of course a far better result and will lead to a better – more readable – printout.

It was also easier to remove the elements with Aardvark because it was visually showing a red square around the selected element making it easier to decided whether to remove that element or not.

Conclusion:

The best way to print websites is to use Firefox with the Aardvark extension. If you do print a lot you should definitely consider installing that extension.

Read More:

Aardvark Extension
Nuke Anything Enhanced Extension

The second new feature is a print function. It is not working correctly yet but I’m in contact with the author and the issue will be fixed soon. The print function which is available on all single articles pages makes it possible to print the content of the articles without the sidebars.

I have come to the decision to offer the myspace song download script on another url so that everyone will be able to download songs from myspace by simply pasting the bands homepage. The script is available at unblockr.

Last but not least I have changed the proxy that was used at Unblockr for the last days. I think the new one is even faster and displays more websites correctly.