I sometimes want to print documentation off the web and I was looking for a way to clean up the images and advertising that cluttered up the pages in print preview. Print Friendly does just that and it does so quickly. It also lets you save your cleaned up document as a PDF. Install their browser tool or enter a URL right in the box on their home page. Its a neat little tool that does one big job, but does it well.
I’ve been using ‘Print Friendly’ for years, I archive with it to PDF articles found on the Web (some of which found here on DCT), and I call the site’s function with a bookmarklet made accessible via a dedicated toolbar button… et voila 🙂
Really handy, and renders 99% of the pages in a particularly neat and sober layout. Not to mention the PDF’s file size, negligible compared to what a normal page backup requires. No adds, no fuss, just the article and most images (sometimes, because of the way the website inserted them in their page they won’t appear on ‘Print Friendly”‘s layout, but seldom). Really worth it. Great you review it here.
Ali:
Thanks for the comments. Glad you find it useful too. I’m always on the lookout for cool tools.
Karen
Hi Karen,
I’ll stay tuned for other little gems reviewed by you therefor 🙂
No flattery but truth : many many interesting articles here. “Nice place” 🙂
Regarding THINK:
I worked at IBM in the early ’50s, and saw on a wall the full text from which TJ Watson’s slogan came:
Think, for when the Great Scorer comes,
to write against your name,
He writes not, that you won or lost,
But how you played the game.
Stan:
My dad worked for 20 years with IBM. He had an old desk plaque with the word THINK on it and I never knew the context for it. Thanks for the info!
Karen
Dave, I’m sorry to have to say this but your webpages are the worst to try and print out!
http://www.gcflearnfree.org/word2013/word-2013-embedding-an-excel-chart/print
Before downloading Print Friendly, I copied the above mentioned url onto the Print Friendly webpage. The final product for printing didn’t include any of the original graphics. Could this be a setting on my PC? I would be grateful if you could answer my concern at your convenience.
Cheryl
It’s not your PC. From a cursory glance at the page code generated by Print Friendly it appears it is unable to determine the image size from the original URL so it hides the image from the final output.
Cheryl, I think that’s because the page has no extraneous images, columns or ads anyway? In which case, why did you go to all the bother of visiting PrintFriendly and copying and pasting in the url, when you could have just printed it to XPS or PDF as it was shown on screen?
I understand your question but I still wanted to see how effective (or not) Print Friendly is.It’s the detective in me.
It didn’t do a very good job on ”howstuffworks.com’ so I’ll pass.