Printing from an Internet Browser

Using a printer to keep a physical copy of pages you are browsing online can be frustrating and an unnecessary waste of paper and ink. Not only does the advertising print, but also the formatting doesn’t work properly, and printed sheets with two images and no text or text only are not uncommon.

Selecting print from a browsers file menu causes the browser to send everything showing in the window to the printer. To avoid this you will need to plan ahead before clicking ‘print’.

Option 1

Keep an eye out for the special ‘print page’ button. Many web pages include a print page version now. Google Maps, for example, allows you to bring up another window where you can customise your print options, including how many and what size maps to add to your printed directions. Many news or text based sites offer a downloaded PDF or Word formatted document for printing purposes. These pages will save you time and materials.

Option 2

If there is no specific print version button on the web page, you will need to decide how much you want to print. If you only want to print a small section or a block of text, highlight what you want and right click it, and then select ‘copy’. Open a new blank text page and right click again, this time selecting ‘paste’. You can now format the text as you wish.

Option 3

If you only want to print an image from a web page, you can usually right click and copy the image and then paste it into a photo editing program or a simple ‘paint’ type program to print it from there.

Option 4

If the web page you wish to print from is mainly text, or the amount of text is too great to copy and paste into a whole new text document, you will have to print it from the web browser. This means you may get more graphic elements then you want. You can control the extent of this by ‘right clicking’ on a frame (section of a page) and then selecting ‘open this frame in a new window’. You can then print only what is showing from the browsers file menus without as much waste.

You must remember that websites were designed to be read by web browsers and not printers, and the two do not interact well, but following the simple instructions above should solve you a lot of hassle and time!