Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: FinePrint

Five days to go before the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway ends. We have given away lots of licenses to many popular software programs and today's program is no exception to that rule. FinePrint is a printing software that can be used to manage print jobs before they are send to an actual printer on the computer system. It is basically a tool to reduce paper and ink usage on a computer system without reducing the quality of the prints.

If you regularly print out websites or documents you must have noticed that they do not fit perfectly on paper all the time. Websites are usually to large to fit correctly on paper which will move some elements - usually those on the right side that do not fit on the print - to a second paper. This could leave you with menus that will be printed on their own paper, something that is not normally needed at all.

FinePrint offers ways to deal with those pages and a few additional features that make it an interesting software for everyone who prints out those documents regularly.

Installation of FinePrint should go through without problems. It adds itself as a virtual printer to the computer system suggesting to the user that it should be set as the default printer on the system. Either way print jobs can then be send to the software application where they will be listed in the main interface.

You can send multiple print jobs to FinePrint and the software will display them all in its interface. One of the major features of the software is to remove pages that are not needed in the printout. You can flip through the pages and zoom in on them to find out if a page is needed or not. Pages that are not needed can be removed easily with the click of the button.

FinePrint will display the paper savings in the status bar which should give you an indication of its effectiveness.

Removing papers from a print job is one thing, combining pages on one paper is another. The printing software can print 1,2,4 or 8 sheets of the print job on a single sheet. It can also print them double-sided if the printer is supporting that feature. Printing 8 pages on one sheet is good for eagle-eye users or archiving purposes.

Additional options are available to save computer ink. Graphics can be removed from the printouts and the quality can be set to grayscale to use only black ink when printing. You can define borders, margins and bindings and also add stamps (confidential, proof, internal use etc) to the papers.

If the document is ready for printing you can simply send it to one of the connected printers by pressing the printer button in the FinePrint interface.

The only thing that is missing is the ability to remove or move objects on a page as well. Other than that is is a great application to save paper. Could be very handy in office or for users who regularly print out websites and other documents.

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