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How to Print Webpages

How to print from webpages without wasting a lot of paper

Please do not print whole webpages! Webpages are full of things that you don’t need on a printed page - links, advertisements, pictures that serve no purpose. Don’t waste ink and paper on them.

A webpage may be short, it may be very long. What you see in the browser window may be only a very small part of what is there. Look at the scrollbar on the right side of the window, the thing that you can drag up and down. A small vertical scrollbar means that the page is very long, it could be ten or more pages printed. You can not print one “page” of a webpage, as you can a Word document, because a web browser is not a word processor. It is made for viewing, not printing. Very often, the text as printed will be very hard to read.

One way to print a page exactly as you want it is to go to Print What You Like, a website that lets you edit any page. You paste or type in the address of the page that you want to print, and it appears in a special editing frame. It can be a little tricky to cut out all of the junk from some pages, but you can do a lot with it.

For simple jobs, you can print selected text without the rest of a page. First highlight the part you want with the mouse. Then press Ctrl + P on the keyboard (it is faster than searching for a printer icon or something in a menu). Look carefully at the Print dialog window. There should be an option to print only the seletion. If that is grayed out, either re-select and try again or use the copy and paste method.

The best way is to select and COPY only the parts that you need, pasting the copied text into a new Word document. You can edit it, changing font or font size, removing excess material. You can paste the address of the webpage, the URL, from the address bar of the browser, so that you will know where it came from. This is also common courtesy, to ensure that the source gets credit if you pass the information around.

You don’t have to copy everything at once. You can select a small portion at a time and add it to the Word page.

To transfer text:
· Open Word.
· Switch to the browser window. You can click on its button on the Taskbar, or use Alt + Tab on the keyboard. (Try that, you’ll love it.)
· Drag the mouse pointer over the section that you want to copy. If too much is selected, simply try again. It may help to choose a different starting point.
· Copy the text - use Ctrl + C on the keyboard, or right-click inside the highlighted area and choose “Copy” from the menu (always left click on menus).
· Switch to the open Word window. Use Ctrl + V on the keyboard or right-click on empty space in the document and choose “Paste”.

Now you can print from Word. Save the document if you want to print the same item again.

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