Print Relevant Information from a Web Page with PrintWhatYouLike

Cheryl
Oct 1, 2008
Updated • Dec 13, 2012
Internet
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6

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.

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Comments

  1. Ravi said on February 9, 2009 at 8:37 am
    Reply

    Thanks Cheryl. Exactly what I needed. You made my day :-)

  2. AndyJ said on October 6, 2008 at 7:13 am
    Reply

    Interesting website. I don’t normally print web pages but this looks like it could come in handy.

  3. Jojo said on October 1, 2008 at 11:17 pm
    Reply

    There’s many ways around this problem.

    – You can click the print button on the web page which generally gives you a page without ads.

    – You can select what you want to print, bring up the print dialog box and choose “Print selection”

    – If you are using FF and the Scrapbook extension, you can edit the page real time, removing elements that you don’t want, and then print the page.

  4. Patrick Budowski said on October 1, 2008 at 5:08 pm
    Reply

    Try using Zoho

  5. jbhq said on October 1, 2008 at 2:42 pm
    Reply

    fantastic for printing – the editing facilities are truly excellent …
    but clipping (to say EverNote Web) doesn’t work (not their fault) – pity – so you have to edit once it’s clipped, in the destination

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