Wasting Paper Printing? Google to the Rescue w/ PrintWhatYouLike!
Filed Under: Green Technology on July 11, 2009
I admit, for someone who’s so worried about not wasting stuff and being nice to the environment, I print a lot of things. Mostly for research and on-the-go reading, since I hate reading a lot of lengthy things off the computer screen and I definitely don’t spend all day every day sitting here in front of my computer.
Sure, having a notebook means I can go outside with it, sit on the couch with it, etc., but I still end up printing a fair amount of stuff. Not like mountains of it, and I do recycle the paper and even print on both sides, but I’m still printing.
Worse yet, most of my printing is from websites and online documents. That means tons of wasted ink and space thanks to advertisements (like the ones on this site that you check out regularly) and many sites not having a “print without the extras” option (unlike me, who’s nice enough to offer that for you, right down there by the advertisements you’re checking out too).
So if I didn’t have a solution for that, I’d be printing a lot of extra junk and wasting a ton of paper and ink.
But there is a solution for that and it’s FREE.
I literally use this all the time, have tried it in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and even (bleh) Microsoft Internet Explorer. It works in all three.
It’s called PrintWhatYouLike.com and it comes to you courtesy of Google.
It’s very intuitive and easy to use: just put in the URL of the page you want to print, select the stuff you want to keep or remove, have the site remove it for you, then print. It’s a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), so it’s easy to figure out. It also has options for removing backgrounds, stretching text to the edges of the page so columns don’t waste space, etc.
Pretty awesome and definitely worth bookmarking: PrintWhatYouLike.com
