When I bought my first printer, I went through a printing frenzy. I was printing excessively even the things that I now would not even think of printing. Often on webpages, I just printed the whole webpage even though I needed a tiny portion, an image or small portion of the text. Now that I understand the value of paper and printer ink, I try to avoid printing unless very much needed to. Sometimes on webpages when I need only a small portion to be printed, I use the free Capture & Print extension for Firefox to capture an area from the webpage and print only that.
The Capture & Print extension does not require to restart the Firefox web browser, so you can start using it as soon as you install it. It installs an icon in the toolbar. It can be used in three modes based on which of the mouse buttons you use on this toolbar icon.
If you left-click on this icon, it will allow you to select the area that you want to print. Initially the whole webpage is selected and shown in yellow color, but you can also drag-select any custom the area from the webpage. The dimensions of the selected area would be shown at the top-left corner of the selected area, which is useful if you are trying to capture a specific size from the webpage.
As soon as you make the selection and release the mouse button, it will create a preview of the print-out and display you the Print Preview window. Here you can customize the zoom level and send it to be printed on your connected printer.
If you do not want to send the captured webpage to the printer but to the clipboard then you can right-click on the Capture & Print toolbar icon – this captures visible area and sends it to the clipboard. In case you middle-click on this toolbar button then entire webpage is captured and sent to the clipboard.
Conclusion: If you want to help the environment by reducing the use of paper, then you can start by limiting your printing paper requirements. The Capture & Print extension for Firefox allows you to select only the portion of the webpage you actually need and saves you from printing the entire page.
You can download and install the Capture & Print extension from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/capture-print/.