
Printing only what you like (Format any web page for printing) - tortilla
http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/
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ROFISH
Not that this isn't awesome or anything, but this is a hack for so people can
print over poor designers. A print media CSS file should be included to clear
all the garbage so that printing will only show what you want.

See: <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html#media-types>

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jonathan_pwyl
It would be great if every site offered a printer-friendly view. The web would
be so much more usable. But I also believe the ultimate authority on how a
page looks and prints should be you. What if company policies force designers
to include ink-draining advertisements on the printer-friendly version (
_cough_ cnn.com _cough_ )? What if you don't like the font a page uses, or
only want to print part of the page, or want to merge multiple pages into one
print job? A printer-friendly stylesheet won't do that for you, but
PrintWhatYouLike will. I totally agree that PrintWhatYouLike will mostly be
used to get around poorly designed sites, but print stylesheets are only part
of the solution. The other part of the solutions is giving you the ability to
take a designers page and customize it to suit your own unique needs.

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markbao
This is really well done. Finally no more wasted paper with sidebars and
footers on them...

Also, font changing is excellent. Trebuchet MT isn't easy on the eyes.

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DocSavage
It's also interesting that printwhatyoulike.com runs on Google's App Engine.
(See [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/10/app-engine-
commu...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/10/app-engine-community-
update.html))

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chaostheory
yeah, this (currently printwhatyoulike's front page) "This Google App Engine
application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later."
isn't exactly a great advertisement for the service

~~~
DocSavage
I'm surprised they didn't lift the quotas for printwhatyoulike, given they
advertised it on the App Engine blog. Still, the "preview" status of App
Engine is well known. If you don't want to worry about quotas, either wait
until they allow payment, get them to significantly up your quota before you
go public, or deploy on another system for now.

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jonathan_pwyl
Aargh. I thought the over quota issues had been fixed :-( GAE is a great
service, and it makes deploying and hosting an application dead simple, but
how it actually works is a big mystery. GAE doesn't give any indication that
your application is at or near the limit of a quota. Even now, while
PrintWhatYouLike is giving over quota errors, the GAE dashboard for
PrintWhatYouLike says that everything is a-ok. DocSavage, I wish I would have
taken your advice a few weeks ago:)

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DTrejo
This is great for those of us who print PG's essays. Now the column can fill
the whole page, meaning less whitespace.

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kenver
Nice service. It was only yesterday that I was copy/pasting into word to print
some slides.

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jonathan_pwyl
Thanks everyone for the fantastic suggestions!!! The inspiration for the site
actually came from wanting a way to print pg's essays without wasting so much
paper. If you find any bugs or can't believe we left out your favorite
feature, please post it here or contact me at admin@printwhatyoulike.com.

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snprbob86
I wish I had this years ago. But now? The only things I print have an
optimized print version (maps, boarding passes, etc). I can't remember the
last time I experienced this problem...

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mcargian
I don't know about you, but when learning a new topic, I find it easier to
print the content I want to read, and highlight it old-skool style with a
highlighter. It helps me for reading comprehension, later referencing, and
those off line meetings where you want to show something quickly out of your
printed notes.

~~~
snprbob86
I can see the value in that, but I prefer a quantity over quality approach.
When learning a new topic, I read as many materials about it as I possibly
can. I don't worry too much about grasping it fully right away. I'll just
survey as much land as possible. In the end, I have a much broader
appreciation for a topic and have crystalized a far more sophisticated view of
it. I also find that when I return to the earlier materials I read, they are
much easier to understand.

I don't have time to print things...

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wave
Design suggestion: On the print page the menu on left to Remove Background,
Remove Images... and etc, all have different sizes (width). I think this makes
your site to look unprofessional. I suggest to use the same width.

~~~
jonathan_pwyl
Thanks! This change will appear in the next release.

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pogos
May i have "Save" button + unique url for every page i edit please?

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zandorg
I find it hard to figure out some modern web startups, but this works well and
it's easy to use. I'll be using it in future.

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keven
Similar to Aardvark, a Firefox extension

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jonathan_pwyl
Both Aardvark and Nuke Anything are super cool tools, and I stole a lot of
ideas from them while creating PrintWhatYouLike. But PrintWhatYouLike also
adds a whole bunch of new stuff no other service offers. Here are a few of the
new features:

* pwyl is a webapp so you don't need to customize or install anything and you aren't tied to any particular browser

* merge pages together - you can combine multiple pages together into one page, and print them as one document. Your changes from the first page are automatically applied to any additional pages.

* pwyl is easy to use - there is a full toolbar, and you can see what you have selected. With Aardvark you have to memorize keyboard commands

* extra features like change text size, font, remove images.

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josefresco
Looks like Clipmarks but instead of bookmarking/blogging it's for printing.

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sonink
useful stuff - plugins for wordpress, drupal etc. might be useful for
distribution

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user88372
This should be part of Firefox

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trezor
That might be a more userfriendly way of doing it, but my favourite way of
dealing with pages like that is using Platypus with Greasemonkey to edit pages
on the fly.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/737>

