Print What You Like and Print Friendly: optimize websites for printing

December 3, 2013 4:10 PM

Print What You Like and Print Friendly are two similar free web services that address the same desire: remove unwanted elements from webpages before you print them or save them as a PDF. Additionally, both sites include bookmarklets, as well as extensions/addons (PWYL: Chrome; PF: Chrome, Firefox).

Print What You Like looks to be a bit more robust and generates the pages more similarly to the way they are rendered online, and they've made a spiffy Page Zipper feature, to "zip" multi-page websites together. Print Friendly is great for quickly deleting features you don't want to print, and it looks like you can dig around and find more features.

posted by filthy light thief (16 comments total)

Neither of them solve the heartbreaking problem of creating the near-to-blank last page. Appropriate vertical scaling to fit is a bit hard to do, but would earn my gratitude.
posted by scruss at 4:41 PM on December 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

scruss: Even LaTeX has problems with that, though I think that is in part due to the fact its algorithms were constrained by 1970s RAM amounts so it was built do do everything one page at a time. However, that problem is non-trivial to say the least...
posted by Canageek at 4:49 PM on December 3, 2013

Funny, I just found Print What You Like a few days ago. It's a great idea, but I find it a bit futzy...it takes a few tries to get it right.
posted by zardoz at 5:05 PM on December 3, 2013

scruss, on MetaFilter threads, you can use PWYL and delete enough individual comments to fit on the appropriate number of pages (and create your own revisionist version of a discussion at the same time). PF seems to not render comments, or at least not for new threads (I tried this thread as trial run, and I only saw the OP, no comments).
posted by filthy light thief at 5:24 PM on December 3, 2013

PWYL is a lifesaver when you need to print news articles for class handouts. I made extensive use of it when I was teaching a current-events-based course.
posted by BrashTech at 5:44 PM on December 3, 2013

Print What You Like is also great if you're a librarian assisting a patron print out a webpage on a public terminal. You can save them inadvertently printing out eight pages of adds and navigation and just print the single bit of page that they're actually interested in.
posted by coleboptera at 6:01 PM on December 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

As much as I appreciate these kinds of services, they wouldn't be necessary if developers took a moment to add just a little bit of code to the bottom of their site CSS:

@media print {
header, nav { display: none; }
}

It's frustrating (and, admittedly, something of a pet peeve) that in an age of "responsive design" many designers won't take the time to ensue that a web page looks as good on the printed page as it does on mobile devices. (Metafilter, as it is in many things, is a wonderful exception to to this rule).
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 7:07 PM on December 3, 2013 [3 favorites]

As much as I appreciate these kinds of services, they wouldn't be necessary if developers took a moment to add just a little bit of code to the bottom of their site CSS

These sites do more than that - they allow you to really customize the printed (or PDF'd) version of the page. In the case of MetaFilter's front page, you can delete not only the adverts, but also individual posts from the page view.

As such, these services provide an option that developers generally wouldn't provide, even if they had the time/skill to provide those options for printing out their sites.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:33 PM on December 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

> you can use PWYL and delete enough individual comments to fit on the appropriate number of pages

Yeah, but deleting stuff ≠ making the content fit the pages.
posted by scruss at 7:43 PM on December 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

I recently worked on a site that we suspected some users would like to print several sections of, which included long tables, and maybe 7-8 printed pages of content. Using a print specific page break class was key, though a bit finicky. I wanted to use page-break-inside: avoid I kept expecting it to function like an indesign "keep paragraphs together". Whomp whomp. Barely works with paragraphs. Doesn't work with tables.

And since we were talking about actual tabular content (think 80 rows of services and costs*) it seemed all nice and semantic to use actual tables. And of course the print style sheets were in the "if we have enough time" category of features/deliverables. So some of the main pages got a few .page-break-after classes inserted by hand, since attaching the property to an h2 was going to leave some big gaps.

So yeah, css for print still sucks. For a tiny boutique site? Awesome, you should polish up those print sheets. Do some cute print-only easter eggs. For long, highly variable and sometimes tabular content? I'm not seeing good solutions. I'll be keeping these print services in mind for the future.

*and you might ask if 80 row long tables isn't a failure of information architecture, and you would be correct, but the answer is legal department.
posted by fontophilic at 5:51 AM on December 4, 2013

I use a similar alternative called CleanPrint, which also enables outputting to PDF, Email, Text, Box, DropBox, Google Drive, and Google Cloud Print.
posted by pmurray63 at 7:16 AM on December 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's a great idea, but I find it a bit futzy...it takes a few tries to get it right.

story of my life.
posted by futz at 7:34 AM on December 4, 2013

scruss: Neither of them solve the heartbreaking problem of creating the near-to-blank last page. Appropriate vertical scaling to fit is a bit hard to do, but would earn my gratitude.

filthy light thief: scruss, on MetaFilter threads, you can use PWYL and delete enough individual comments to fit on the appropriate number of pages (and create your own revisionist version of a discussion at the same time). PF seems to not render comments, or at least not for new threads (I tried this thread as trial run, and I only saw the OP, no comments).

scruss: Yeah, but deleting stuff ≠ making the content fit the pages.

I was being cutesy. In reality, Print What You Like allows you to resize the content fields, which may allow you to fudge some things into fitting more neatly on complete pages, resolving the issue with leaving a few lines trailing on a last page. It's a bit tricky and it's not automatic, but it looks like the best option present.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:55 AM on December 4, 2013

The HackTheWeb extension for Firefox does this for me (as well as cut down on Tumblr cruft), but it can be frustrating to use until you get the hang of it. Also has the benefit of being able to tailor down individually generated and/or sensitive pages.
I haven't tried now well the PF extension works.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:13 AM on December 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

I just right click -> inspect the page in Chrome then move the mouse over the elements one at a time, hitting delete for each element I don't want to print.
posted by jeffamaphone at 8:56 AM on December 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

How do you use these on pages where you have to log in? When I try, it just gives me the login page to print.
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:01 PM on December 5, 2013