Note: There is a bookmarklet available that you can add to your favorite non-Firefox browser.

Before

Here is the “Print Preview” for a weathernewengland.com story. There is a lot of additional “junk” at the top that you just do not need with a printed version.

The bottom of the “Print Preview” is even worse. Approximately two of the five pages for this article would be a total waste of your paper and ink. But this is a problem that is very easy to fix.

Setup

Once you have installed the extension the only thing that you will need to do is add the “Toolbar Button” to a convenient location in your browser’s UI. There are no options for you to worry with…

PrintWhatYouLike in Action

To get started simply press the “PrintWhatYouLike Button” for the webpage that you are wanting to print out.

A “Sidebar” will open with various commands that allow you to tweak the webpage to best suit your printing needs. Here you can see the areas being selected for removal are outlined in red. Click within the red border to select that area and hit delete.

Note: The selected area will have a “yellow tint” as confirmation for deletion.

Notice how much cleaner the article looks already with the removal of individually selected sections. It is also easy to remove certain areas of the article if you are wanting to exclusively focus on certain content or a specific area.

This is the result when we tried the “Auto Format – Do It For Me!” option. It did an extremely good job of cleaning everything up with only a single click. Notice that all of the text (i.e. article title, author name) even has the same color as opposed to the screenshot shown above.

Use the PrintWhatYouLike Website Directly

If you prefer to use a different browser (or want to avoid an additional extension in Firefox), you can visit the website directly to enter the webpage address. While you are there you can also add a bookmarklet to your browser.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to clean webpages up for printing, then the PrintWhatYouLike extension, bookmarklet, and website are going to be your printer’s best friends.

Links

Download the PrintWhatYouLike Button extension (Mozilla Add-ons)

Visit the PrintWhatYouLike website