My friend Patricia is in the habit of printing anything she deems important on her computer screen. Only a few days ago, she printed out more than hundred pages of Thai recipes which later turned out to be the same one she had printed a few months ago. Printing everything to save it for later is a good idea, but it increases the cost incurred on printing paper and ink or toner. Not to mention that printing is also not very good for the environment as printing paper is made from trees and to meet the increasing demand of the paper consumption they cut down even more trees.
Fortunately, you can still print the information and save the paper (and ink or toner) by using the free CleanPrint browser extension. This extension lets you remove the unwanted portions of a webpage so that you print only the information that you really need and save yourself from printing multiple pages containing extraneous information.
The CleanPrint extension is available for almost all the popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. We tried it in the Chrome browser. After the installation, you would see a green tree leaf icon in the toolbar. Now whenever you want to print a webpage, instead of printing it directly you should click on the CleanPrint button in the toolbar.
This will open an interface which lets you remove the unwanted elements from the webpage like images, links, text, etc. You can even adjust the font size of the webpage and add a note of your own. This is useful on pages where the font size is either too big or too small. The extension gives you a variety of output options – print it on your printer, save it as PDF or TXT file, email it to someone or upload it to your cloud storage accounts like Google Drive, Box.net or Dropbox.
Conclusion: You can reduce your printing and ink/toner costs through the use of the CleanPrint extension which removes the extraneous and unwanted content from webpages so that you print only the desired information. It also allows you to save the webpages as PDF or TXT files and upload them to cloud storage accounts.
You can get the CleanPrint extension from http://www.formatdynamics.com/bookmarklets/.