Too Much Printed Garbage

[schuarta]

When you go to the average website - recipes, catalogs, written material - and hit your PRINT key, you always end up up with far more material on the printed page than you really wanted.  Wasted paper, wasted ink.

Is there some sort of print utility that lets you use your mouse to make the standard "variable sized dashed rectangular box" around the material on screen which is important to you, and then print only the contents of the box you just drew?    

I'm running a PC with Windows 7 Pro, feeding an Epson NX515 printer.

[soybean]

Are you using special print options found on many websites to provide less wasteful printing or do you just use the main browser print command and print the page?  You should be using the special print options whenever available.  For example, on allrecipes.com, you will see a print button on the web page and it is much less wasteful than using the browser print command and printing the whole page.  I've attached a screen capture from allrecipes.com to show what I'm talking about.


[recovering disk space - old attachment deleted by admin]

[schuarta]

I do use those PRINT options whenever they are present.  However, often I don't want even the full page(s) they present.  My approach to cooking some new dish, as an example, is to "grab" the list of ingredients from 3 or 4 recipes, and wind up with my own personal refined ingredients listing.

I am aware that Adobe reader has a "snapshot" feature that allows you to "box and copy" particular information, but the majority of websites are not in .pdf format.

[Linux711]

I would just take a screenshot using the Print Screen button and then use paint to cut out what I need and print it.

[truenorth]

A very simple way to do this is with the page open that you wish to extract and then print only a specific portion of do the following.
1. Highlight with your cursor the specific portion you wish to use(eventually print).
2.Using the "edit" selection from your tool bar select"copy"
3. Open a window from a program such as "word" or "notepad" or something similar (whatever you are used to or prefer).
4. With that window open from the associated tool bar select "edit" select "Paste"
5. You now have the specific (and only) material that you want to print. Now use your preferred method to print the content of that document.
Voila your done --mission accomplished. truenorth

[soybean]

With allrecipes.com, when you use the print function on their website, you can choose whether to print a recipe on a full page, a 3x5 printout, or a 4x 6 printout.

My approach to cooking some new dish, as an example, is to "grab" the list of ingredients from 3 or 4 recipes, and wind up with my own personal refined ingredients listing.

Then, why even print separate recipes if you merely want to extract part of their ingredients to combine with other ingredients in coming up with your own recipe?  Seems to me some copy and paste would be the better approach here.  And, when you get YOUR recipe completed, then you can save it to a WordPad file or whatever.

Edit: I see truenorth and I are thinking along the same line here.

[truenorth]

soybean then i am in good company.  truenorth

[soybean]

 

[Broni]

If you use Firefox, I suggest Aardvark add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aardvark/
It'll allow you to isolate and print any single website frame.

When you start Aardvark, you can select any frame, like this:



Then after pressing "i" key selected frame will open in a new tab, ready for printing.

[schuarta]

And the winner is:

Aardvark

That will do exactly what I want.  Thanks Broni.

[Broni]

You're very welcome

[MrSelfDestruct]

http://www.printwhatyoulike.com may also be worth checking out. I use their bookmarklet every time I print web pages.