A Better Way To Save
Do you need to save website pages for future reading or sharing?
There are a many ways to bookmark websites, both locally on your device or via online bookmarking services.
There are other times you may wish to print the website page to paper (which I always consider a last resort) or save as a PDF (which I find VERY useful at times).
Saving a website page to PDF allows you to have a more “book friendly” appearance, which you can send as an email attachment or print to paper at a later date (if you must).
Print Friendly!
One of our FAVORITE websites is a FREE online service named PrintFriendly.
From their website:
PrintFriendly cleans and formats web pages for perfect print experience. PrintFriendly removes Ads, Navigation and web page junk, so you save paper and ink when you print. It’s free and easy to use. Perfect to use at home, the office, or whenever you need to print a web page.
It is amazingly easy to use.
Check out the following video demonstration.
Before
I put PrintFriendly to the test with a random blog post article.
The web page had a sidebar on the right-hand side of the page that contained superfluous information which had nothing to do with the article. There were also several ads.
For the sake of comparison, I first used the default “Print” command built in to my browser.
It indicated there would be 13 sheets of paper required to print, and the formatting was quite messy.
I canceled the print window.
After
Next, I tested the same webpage using PrintFriendly.
Here are the steps:
- I copied the URL from the web address bar
- I visited PrintFriendly.com
- I pasted the URL in the “enter a url” text box
- I selected “Print Preview”
A separate preview window opened. All of the ads and the sidebar were removed. And it was perfectly formatted.
Furthermore, the number of sheets of paper required was 10, a reduction of 3 sheets.
Next, with a single click of the “Remove Images” check box, I turned off all of the images. The images were very large and were not required for an understanding of the article.
This reduced the number of sheets of paper to 5, an additional reduction of 5 sheets.
Then I easily removed a block of text at the bottom of the page that was marketing hype provided by the publisher of the article, saving another sheet of paper.
Also, I reduced the text size from 100% to 90%. The text was still legible and eliminated an additional sheet of paper.
In a matter of seconds, I reduced the number of sheets from 13 to 3.
At this point, you can choose to “Print” to paper, or create a PDF. I chose the PDF option which took a few seconds to process, then I downloaded the PDF to my desktop.
No More Excuses
I highly recommend this service to anyone with that nasty habit of printing everything to paper, as it will save a LOT of paper, ink and money.
There are also extensions and bookmarklets available for your browsers for one-click access, eliminating the 4 steps listed above. Simply visit the website page you wish to print/save as PDF, and click on the bookmarklet. Simple, quick and easy!
Lastly, this capability is also made available by Printfriendly as a FREE WordPress plugin. Click here for details.
Now, STOP wasting paper!