Printing web pages is still a giant headache
Why is printing web pages still such a headache?
Today I wanted to print a fairly lengthy blog post that had over 100 comments. But I didn't want to print the comments. Yet there was no easy way for me to print only the blog content.
Sure, I could have kept guessing at what page range to print but I have better things to do with my time.
Someone make this easier. Please.
9 comments for this blog post so far...
November 19, 2010 at 10:37 am
Steve Williams
Have you tried the Readability addon for firefox? It strips all the stuff and allows you to print directly. Go to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
November 19, 2010 at 10:50 am
Patric Welch
Steve, is there something similar that isn’t tied to Firefox? I use Google Chrome.
November 19, 2010 at 10:56 am
Indiana Chevy Dealers
Why dont you use Snagit and screen capture what you want and then print it out from there. Cant you also highlight what you want to print, right click on it and do print selected only?
Chris Theisen
November 19, 2010 at 11:04 am
Patric Welch
Chris, SnagIt is definitely an option and I already use that software regularly. Still kind of a pain to have to jump to 3rd party software. Highlighting never seems to work with images especially with all the new CSS stuff web sites use these days.
November 19, 2010 at 11:07 am
Indiana Chevy Dealers
Good point about jumping around and the images. There are some screen capture plug ins for Chrome, not sure which is best though. Build something that does it and remember the little people when you are rich and more famous than you are now.
Chris
November 19, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Michelle Hartz
What ever happened to print previews? It would be great to have a print preview and be able to cut the print boundaries, kind of like Page Break Preview in Excel.
November 20, 2010 at 10:25 am
Patric Welch
Michelle, most browsers have Print Preview but I find it extremely unreliable. I just believe there has to be a think-outside-the-box solution that would make web printing easier than it is today.
November 23, 2010 at 6:16 am
Dave Schafer
Print it out to a PDF file, then just print the pages you want…
November 23, 2010 at 9:14 am
Patric Welch
Dave, can’t believe I haven’t thought of that. That’s a great temporary solution! I say temporary because I’m testing out a new product someone mentioned in an email to me. If it’s good, I’ll write about it back here on my blog. Thanks!
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