Productivity Hack: PrintWhatYouLike

It happens regularly. I come across an article that  I want to print- only to get discouraged by all the ads, background and images in the web page. Instead, I bookmark the article and promptly forget about it.

Sound Familiar?

It drove me insane till I found the perfect solution. Courtesy: a quick firefox add-on search.

PrintWhatYouLike is an excellent service that lets you select only those parts of a web page that you want to print. Here are some options that have made my printing life easy.

• Remove images and backgrounds from a web page
• Increases or decreases the font of the page according to preference
• Provides the option to save the selected text as a PDF or HTML file
• Has a firefox add-on! Though its in the experimental stages, so far, it’s working fine for me.
• Auto Formats the page for you – and lets you choose whatever text you want to print from that too!
• Lets you print directly from the web page.

What the free service doesn’t let you do is save clips. To save clips you’ll have to register and in the trial version you can only save 2 change sets and 6 clips.

To save more, you’ll have to upgrade to their Pro account which costs $5 per month. It also lets you save changes, snippets and tracks the money and paper you’ve saved by using PrintWhatYouLike.

The Pro account is for you if you like to keep a copy of your saved stuff online and are trying to keep track of how green your paper trail is.

For an average user (like me) the free version works great. I haven’t signed up for the trial version because the add-on meets all my needs so far.

Verdict: I love it!

Do you use an alternate service? Is so, tell us about it! Or tell us about your experience with PrintWhatYouLike.