Save Ink By Printing What You Like

Everything costs money now days and with today’s tight economy, it’s imperative that you save every penny possible. That or get all your pennies worth when purchasing an item, at least that’s how the saying goes. Anyways, I’m not sure if you noticed yet or not but if you have a printer at home, you should have realized that changing ink cartridges can be costly! Now think about all the times you have printed out a webpage that was bloated with advertisements and banners (or other items that you had no need for) and you’ll have notice that you could have saved a ton of ink if only you didn’t print out all those junk! Well in this article, I’ll introduce you to a awesome and free online service that will help you lower your ink usage as well as some techniques you can use to get the same results.

When printing webpages, a lot could go wrong. Texts being cutoff, useless pictures, banners and advertisement that has nothing whatsoever to do with what you want to print, long columns of text being squished into a narrow column on the side that spans a couple of pages (which results in wasted paper and ink printing the other material in the main body of the webpage) etc. When printing webpages, you usually want to conserve ink usage and conserve paper. Conserve paper? Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Printing paper can be dirt cheap but still, why need two pages when everything you need can be fit into just one?
Well, all that is about to change with an easy to use and effective online service that aims to help you conserve your ink and paper usage. This is made possible because the service helps you easily eliminate anything and everything that you deem not necessary on the webpage you want to print out. This can all be done easily and effectively. No coding knowledge is necessary as the service is WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get). So, let’s get down to it!

PrintWhatYouLike

PrintWhatYouLike (PWYL) is a free web service that almost instantly allows you to modify a webpage so that only the items you want gets printed. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself and see how it works!

1. Simply visit PrintWhatYouLike’s website everytime you need to modify a webpage before printing.

2. To begin editing your webpage, simply paste the URL into the input box and that’s it! Almost instantly, you’ll be greeted by PWYL’s editing interface. In fact, you can simply view their demo to get a feel of how the service works. Simply click on the ‘Try the Demo’ button to get started. Actually, I recommend everyone go through the demo at least once because it allows you to try each feature PWYL has to offer!

3. As you can quickly see, your webpage is on the right side while the tools to edit the page is on your left. Everything is in plain English so all you have to do is to select the parts of the website you want to edit and use the options in the panel. Here in this picture I’ve highlighted the part of the tool that you would most likely use most:

4. PWUL is very versatile. It has a Undo feature in case the result isn’t what you intended it to be and provides you with a couple of automated options like completely removing all images (saves you a great deal of color ink) and the background. Heck there’s even a Auto Format button for all you lazies out there! However, my testing of it didn’t exactly yielded the results I wanted. Your mileage obviously will vary. Another really awesome feature is Isolate. Simply select only what you want printed out, click on this option and everything else on the page will disappear! Here is a sample before and after shot of a video gaming website I regularly visit. Notice all the pictures missing in the second screenshot:

Once you are done formatting the webpage, simply print it out! I highly suggest you take the time to play around with the features of PrintWhatYouLike because it offers a lot. While you may think initially that this method of saving ink isn’t really effective, think about in the long run. As you print more and more material, the ink wasted on printing useless junk will begin to pile up. This is especially true when it comes to your color cartridges. They can be very expensive to purchase so you definitely want to squeeze every drop out of it and so you certainly don’t want to do that by printing out useless garbage!

Want an even easier way to access PrintWhatYouLike? Then you should use their own Bookmarklet. Simply dock the bookmarklet onto your browser’s bookmark toolbar and any time you want to print out a web page you’re on, click on the bookmark and you’ll instantly be taken to PrintWhatYouLike’s website!

Other Techniques to Save Ink

Saving cartridge ink isn’t very hard. It just takes a little practice and some discipline. For example, just as with using PrintWhatYouLike, you as the user must take the initiative to want to save ink and utilize the service in the first place. Sure it’s easy to just forget about everything I’ve just talked about in this article and just hit the Print Now button to print out everything. You still get what you wanted so what’s the big deal huh? Well once again, it’s about being able to save money and so unless you are a high roller, than it’s safe to say you can skip reading the rest of this article! But if not, here are some very simple techniques to get more out of your ink cartridges besides using PWYL.

Using the Copy and Paste Method
It still strikes me odd how such simple of a method can be overlooked by most casual users. Usually, printing stuff from the web consists of nothing more than articles of interests. These articles consist of basically just text! Therefore, all you need to do is just highlight the text, hit Ctrl+C and then paste the contents into your word processor of choice. This could be Microsoft Word, Notepad or Wordpad. Once done so, you can then format the text however you want to, just as you could with a regular document. Afterward, just print it out! No advertisements, banners etc, etc.

Look for the Print Button
A lot of websites are generous enough to provide you with a Print option button for their articles. Clicking this button obviously won’t send the document directly to your printer. What it does usually is allow the website to automatically format and strip away all the other unnecessary components on the webpage so that only the main article remains. Once done so, you can then safely print the formatted webpage without fear of draining your ink.

Selecting the Selection Option
A very handy feature that can be quickly utilized is the Selection option in the print dialog box. Under Print Range, you are allowed to specify the range of pages you want to print. The default is to print everything (which is not what we want as it will print out all the useless junk as well), a certain page range (start printing from page 2 until page 4), or selection. Selecting this last option basically means to tell the printer to only print the material you have highlighted/selected. Therefore on a crowded website, simply just highlight the block of text you want printed out and select the Selection option. This is a quick and easy way to save ink.

Printing in a Lower Quality
I’m sure not everything you print needs to be in excellent quality. For many, as long as you can read every word, than that is good enough. Therefore, what you can do is to lower the print quality so that less ink is needed to produce the document. Obviously the drawback to this is that the document or picture won’t be of high grade but once again if the report isn’t your final research paper or that sales report you need to turn in to your boss, than what’s the big deal? You can set the print quality in your Print Properties dialog box usually:

Printing in Grayscale
As the name implies, printing in grayscale will only print the desired page in black ink. This option can help you save an considerable amount of your colored ink, which tends to be more expensive. This once again applies when you print out simple web documents or draft reports. Save those colored ink for more useful documents and pictures! The setting can be found usually in the same place as the color quality option mentioned about. However this varies from printer to printer.

Don’t Let Your Ink Just Sit There!
Ink is liquid. Therefore eventually it will dry up if left alone for long periods of time. If you’re like me and have very little use for your home printer, it’s recommended that you at least print something once in a while just to get the ink flowing. It doesn’t matter what you print but just so as long you print something. I’ve wasted so many dollars on print cartridges in the past because I didn’t really print anything. Those poor ink cartridges just sat inside the printer unused for literally months and months without any activity. I’ll just say that I’ve learned my lesson! Take my word for it!

Purchase a Laser Printer Instead
I really would love to purchase a laser printer in the near future because as mentioned above, I hardly use my inkjet printer. With ink it dries up without activity. That problem don’t really apply to toner cartridges because it’s not ink or liquid! The life span of a toner cartridge can last way longer than inkjet cartridges. You can purchase cheap laser printers as they are more common now days. While these obviously can’t be compared to those you would see in office environments, it can still get the job done in your home. If you print a lot of word documents, investing in a laser printer can be a smart move. Although the toner cartridges themselves can be a litte more expensive compared to inkjet cartridges, you can usually print a lot more with them. For more information, simply search Amazon’s website for ‘Laser Printers’ and you’ll see that there are actually quite a few that are very affordable. One of them is this laser printer from Brother:

Well, that’s pretty it much as far as I know on how to get the most out of your ink. As I’ve mentioned earlier, you must take the initiative as the user. All of these techniques and methods mean nothing if you don’t utilize them. That would be a big shame because it’s so easy! Not only that but the return profit can be huge in the long run.