Ever try to print a web page?  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  The reason for this is that website content is designed to be displayed on your computer screen, not sent to the printer to be put on paper.  So even though it looks perfect on your monitor, the printed page is often completely messed up.  I’ve even had people call me and complain that their printer isn’t working properly, because the words and images are all out of order and misaligned.  The problem wasn’t the printer, though.  That web page they were trying to print just wasn’t printer friendly.

Some websites are helpful and offer a “printer friendly” version of the content.  This usually works, but most non-commercial websites don’t have that feature.  And actually even a lot of business websites don’t offer it.

But now there’s a solution – and it’s free.  It’s an online service called Print Friendly.  You can see it at PrintFriendly.com.

Using this service could not be any easier.  When you’re viewing a website you want to print, click one time up in the address bar to highlight the address, then do a right-click and choose “Copy”.

Then go to the Print Friendly website and paste it in the URL field and click “print preview”:

If the preview looks okay, print it!

Here’s an example.  I went to an MSN news story.  A screenshot of the website article is below.  As you can see the screen is cluttered with all kinds of junk – navigation links, social media buttons, ads, links to other stories, and several images.  There’s so much stuff that in order to read past the first few lines of the article, you have to scroll down.  I don’t need all that extra stuff  – all I want to print is just the words in the article.

So I copied and pasted the address, and here is what the print preview showed.  Just the title and the text – ready to print!

To print, just hit the link at the top left on the preview.  Next to that is the option to make the content into a PDF file, or you could click the “Email” button to send the article by email.  There are some other options to control the text size and the appearance of images – you can play with those as you like.

I encourage you to experiment with it.  It probably won’t be perfect each time, as there are a million different variations in the way a website can be arranged.  But it should work okay in most cases.

http://www.printfriendly.com