Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Saturday 26 January 2013

Annoyance with printing stuff from a website - any ideas?

Printing from websites has always been a miserable experience. I usually do quite a lot of pre-emptive tinkering on the print preview page before I press 'send'.

I've noticed that quite often the preview version bears little relation to the on-screen view. I presume this is due to the use of style sheets (CSS). These are part of the underlying code (as is html and things like that) which determines what the page will look like on the screen.

I don't want to print the underlying code, but the final page. Unfortunately what I get is the underlying code.

To see what I mean compare the Print Preview option for your own Gmail inbox (looks the same) and your Twitter feed (looks hideous).

When faced with this sort of thing the quickest solution, for me, has been to forego any efforts to print it as real text and just take screencaptures, knit those together in Paint, paste into Word document and print. This works well but is fiddly and I've shown quite a few people how to do it as they'd not found a solution either.

Surely EVERYONE has this problem. How do you get round it and is there a better way?

There are some customisable options in the Print Preview options menu (Windows 7) but none make the page look as pretty as it might.

(And no, copying and pasting the text doesn't entirely solve the problem - it solves a different problem in that I can format the text any way I like, but it doesn't let the web page look like the web page).

1 comment:

  1. When I used Firefox, I had a great add-in called Aardvark, which allowed individual events of a page (adverts, navigation, banner images, etc) to be removed, both before printing, but also to make the page easier to read.

    ReplyDelete

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

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