Easy Web Page Printing from Print Friendly – Review

13 Jul 2010 by Graham Lyons - Featured, News, Reviews Print Friendly, Printing, web design No Comments

Print Friendly is a clever website which solves a common problem for many who wish to print out a web page for reading elsewhere, as well as helping you save paper and ink. There are several reasons why this is a great innovation which I will explain as well as reviewing the whole Print Friendly service.

The problem with web pages is that they don’t naturally translate well onto paper thanks to all the ads and flash and images and stuff. Often the browser will just try and get all the information onto the pages without considering the layout, relevance and readability of the document produced. It will in most cases produce a load of pages with many of them having single ads on them or just a banner. This results in much longer documents than you usually require and the use of a lot more paper and ink too.

While there are of course many websites which provide a link to a ‘print friendly’ version of a page to tackle this problem, often this option will only appear on the final pages of an ecommerce transaction or in a terms and conditions section. With Print Friendly you can translate any page with the click of a button.

Print Friendly’s algorithm takes the URL of the page you want to print out, rearranges the page in a sensible way, lets you easily take out anything you don’t want like ads and images or even paragraphs, and lets you print it out or save it as a PDF. Simples.

Aside from inputting your URL into the box on their website, to use Print Friendly you can drag a button from their homepage to your toolbar and/or you can get a button for your website. You get a handy html snippet after having easily configured it for your site type with a check box and having selected your type of button.

However, having used this tool on a range of different pages other than the ones it suggests on its homepage, I encountered a minor problem. It failed to convert a number of pages due to them not using properly validated code. It does make a suggestion though that you try using their ‘bookmarklet’ tool instead and in most cases this successfully converted the page. The few times that neither managed to produce a result I was confronted with an ‘update your browser with CSS enabled’ message or sometimes a ‘Just a sec…your PDF should open soon’ type message. To be fair though this only arose when I really tried to out-fox Print Friendly.

Don’t let this problem take anything away from this awesome facility. I particularly like the ‘Feedback’ section (provided by uservoice.com) which lets you tell them what you like and don’t like about them and lets you vote on the top ideas. They even give you the status of the top voted suggestions to let you know how they are getting on with adding them to the service. Tops!

Here is Print Friendly's own video to explain how it all works:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOYKL7KYeSQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

I really like this service, everything from its environment saving message to its incredibly simple website is nicely presented and easy to use. I’m sure it will come in handy in the future. Why not try it now by clicking the little PDF icon in the 'Share and Enjoy' section below?