Save Paper, Save Money: 5 Free Software Downloads That Spare Your Printer
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Central Coast, California on 10. 8.08
Photo via lotyloty
Printing out pages and pages of emails, websites and the like is getting more and more pointless, expensive, and, thankfully, taboo both at home and in the business world. However, there are still times when printing is necessary or simply too convenient to pass up.
Yet, people who like to print out info from websites and emails often have to spend a lot of time reformatting and deleting data items to make the printout efficient. Or, more likely, printing website info or email means a lot of wasted ink and pages because no one wants to take the time to reformat all that wasted space, delete the superfluous ads, and so on.
If there is no “Printer Friendly Version” button to click, then free downloadable software that does the reformatting for you is a great solution. We've gathered five great free software options to save paper, ink, time, and green face.
Nuke Anything
Nuke Anything is a FireFox add-on that allows users to simply highlight a section of a webpage, right click, and select “Remove this object.” Voila! The objects are gone and you’re ready to print. This software add-on is handy for text or images. But, of course, you’ll have to be using Firefox to access it.
FinePrint
This program offers multiple ways to quickly and easily format printing, such as deleting unwanted pages or printing several pages on one sheet. While the full version is $49.95, there is a free trial version that has all the features and no time limit – you just have to put up with an extra banner ad printing at the top of the page (kinda defeats the purpose, right?). The banner is eliminated when you throw down the bucks for the full version.
Lexmark Toolbar 3
This free toolbar add-on from Lexmark simplifies the printing process. With a click, you can select a “print text only” option, which removes all images. Or if you want to keep the images, you can edit and resize them directly from the website using Picnik. You can then preview your printout before sending it to the printer to make sure that it’s as minimized as you’d like.
Next Page: More Software Options, Tips for Greener Printing, and Cool Technology for Printing Materials
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I personally use the Scrapbook extension for firefox. It lets me delete things I don't want. Or I paste the article to PSPad (freeware), and I use the 'join lines' or 'remove redundant blank lines' function, and then I paste the text to OpenOffice writer with ctrl+shift+v (lets you paste text in plaintext), set the text to size 7 and I widen the document borders almost to the max. Et voila :)
Don't forget SnagIt!
I use it for all my online receipts and confirmations.
What about CuteWriter? "Prints" to pdf from any program so you don't even use your printer.
Has anyone noticed that treehugger themselves don't have print this page option !! So stop this hypocracy. If you are so concerned about saving paper, why did you put this article on 2 pages and not one?
Hi,
Nice overview indeed. As mentioned in this blog, we've been calculating the CO2 emission for our meetings. 65% or 669.6kg of the CO2 comes from the use of paper. The 100 kg paper puts a heavy burden on our CO2 emission. One might think that using recycled paper shouldn’t place such a load on the environment. In fact, it doesn’t make such a difference: 7 kg CO2 for non recycled paper versus 6 kg CO2 for recycled paper. It isn’t the paper itself put the printing is the evildoer: 4.5 kg
I'd like to add Print what you like as a tip.
Eddy
I agree with teejay wholeheartedly. Treehugger is a great, great, great site. That being said it is probably the WORST site I know in its need to reformat things in order to print them. There is so much extraneous graphic stuff floating around and the articles go on to too many pages. Please fix this. Thanks.
I use Fine Print to save paper but i also highlight the section of a web page i want and in the IE print menu click on "selection" to print only that highlighted section thus saving paper and ink in two ways.
In Firefox you don't need any extra software to print just parts, highlight what you want, go to File-->Print and in the menu choose "Selected" under the "Print Range" option.
I understand some peoples concerns on Treehugger articles being on multiple pages.
However, if you really cared about saving paper, why would you be printing these articles off anyways? People will look at you strange when you say, "Hey check out this article I printed off on saving paper"
Welcome to a digital word, bookmarks and txt files, think of the trees you save by not printing at all.
I love to use PrimoPDF. It allows you to create pdf documents for storing on your hard drive. I use this in my home network to keep my kids from wasting my ink. They save the documents and then they let me know so I can see if it really needs to be printed or not.
Click here to visit PrimoPDF.com
I've always wondered though, at least for larger documents, is the energy used to print off say a 10 page article both sides, and then sit in your living room and read it actually more than used by sitting with your computer turned on, and reading the 10 page article on the screen?
For the recycled vs. the new paper; although it may not be much different in terms of energy usage, I always try to use recycled paper. There is plenty of old used paper out there for us to use, and we don't need to be cutting down more old growth forests for this stuff.