Checking out Michael Horowitz printing tale of woe from Firefox, I have to say he is right. Trying to print this page (test it yourself using print preview) looks like a horrible jumbled mess. Try playing with the example article yourself – it is true! Hold on, there has to be a fix for printing a badly formatted page, right?
If you said yes, you win… well, you win nothing, but you do have the pride of knowing Firefox is a crafty tool in the right hands. What I want Michael to do is left-click on his mouse and select all the text he wishes to print.
Got all the text from the article highlighted? Good. The next step is to go to the File menu and then select “Print…”. (You can also hit Ctrl + P) That will bring up the Print Options box. Under Print range make sure you select “Selection”.
Doing so will make sure you are only printing what you have highlighted from the article. This way you can get rid of the useless junk like the sidebars and headers. You only print what you need! Hit the “OK” button and you should only print the article and none of the rest of the information on the web page.
The final result is a nicely formatted article without any of the rest of the junk you don’t need.
Sounds like Micheal might need to do his research before posting his “Defensive Computing”. Great tip!
The proposed solution has just a little problem : it’s not cross platform as Firefox (3.0.1) for Mac OS X (PPC) doesn’t offer to print the selection.
Another idea, anyone ?
Clipmarks would be one work around for Macs:
http://clipmarks.com/
Also saw some discussion of it here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1372662
Hope that helps!
doesnt work on Ubuntu either :(
but a nice tips though
Anders, might check this out for help with Ubuntu:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869537
From where is the hand clipart in the second image? Nice, I’d like to use it myself.
Nice, good and fast reply….I wasn’t happy with his post.
sure would be nice if print preview worked with selections… is there some way to see how it’ll print before printing?
Unfortunately, Firefox 3 somehow only prints the header and footer ONLY. It used to work with the previous versions and works in IE. This is a bug in the third version that needs to be resolved.
I have followed the solution to the letter. I am printing the highlighted text, but it is in very small letters. Is there a way to increase the size of the print?
Many thanks for any suggestions.