X

PrintWhatYouLike makes any site printer friendly

Ever tried to print a story and have it come up on a ton of pages? Check out PrintWhatYouLike, which lets you pick specific parts of a Web page to print.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn

There's nothing worse than trying to print a two-page article from the Web and have it print out in a half-inch column across 37 sheets of paper. It happens all the time, and if the site you're on doesn't have a special printer friendly option, your only other method was to use special software, or attempt to save the page as a PDF then print it out later.

A service called PrintWhatYouLike takes all the work out of this, and does you one better by letting you select only the parts of the page you want to print, leaving things like large Flash ads, site menus, and other clutter off of your precious bathroom reading.

To do this you just plug in the page's URL. You then have the options of simply clicking the parts of the page you want, or getting rid of things like the site's background and images. There are also some handy tools to change the text size, along with a font changer in case you're printing something off a page that insists on using undersized, illegible fonts.

The service is completely free and worth bookmarking. Power users will want to make use of the bookmarklet, which lets you print any page you're looking at without having to jump back and forth. Just one click and it brings up the special PrintWhatYouLIke interface.

Related: Extra page killer Green Print

[via Lifehacker]

When you run a URL through PrintWhatYouLike it's simply a matter of picking what you actually want to print from the page. (click to enlarge) CNET Networks