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Hints for printing web pages

Print size is affected by viewing size.

This is an annoying feature of Internet Explorer. If you find the text on a web page too small to read comfortably and therefore click View > Text Size and choose Larger or Largest, any printing you do may be correspondingly enlarged. Not only that, but if you print out an email from Outlook Express, that will also use a large font. That's just one more reason for always checking Print Preview.

You can choose to print just one page.

You don't have to print seven or eight pages just to get one recipe or one photograph. Go to the print preview, click through the pages until you see the part you want to print and make a mental note of the page number. Then, after you've clicked “Print,” type that number into the “Pages” place. There'll be two boxes, one marked “from” and the other “to”. If you want to print just page seven, for instance, you type a 7 into each of those two boxes.

Make sure that you print only the page and not its background.

To ensure that this happens:

1. Click on Tools on the browser menu bar.
2. Click on Internet Options.
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Scroll down until you see a printer icon.
5. Make sure that “Print background colours and images” is not checked.
6. Click OK.

This won't affect the printing of pictures or diagrams that are part of the actual page.

If you do want to leave those out as well, click Print, but when the print dialogue appears, don't click OK. Instead, look for a button marked Properties. It's often near the top right-hand corner of the box. If it isn't there, there may be a box marked Setup, and clicking this will take you to a box where you can find Properties. Once you've found the properties box, look through the various tabs until you see a short list of choices that includes Draft. Mark that choice, then click OK as many times as necessary to get back to the usual Print dialogue.

Depending on your printer, you may or may not need to revisit the printer properties and change the setting back to normal before you print a document with pictures. This will depend on your particular printer driver—some keep the latest settings, some go back to default at the end of each session.

Bear in mind, also, that while some pictures are purely decorative, some are an essential part of a page which won't make lots of sense without them.

Always look at the Print Preview.

This not only lets you know if there are more pages than you'd anticipated, but it also lets you check that the page is going to fit properly.

• Clicking the small arrows will move you forwards or backwards through the preview a page at a time.
• Clicking the double arrows will take you to the end or the beginning of the document.
• To go to a particular page, type its number into the page number box and hit enter.
• Clicking the drop down arrow beside the box that here says 75% lets you choose a different view. If you choose 50% you’ll see the whole page (actually you'll see two pages) from top to bottom.
• Clicking one of the two magnifying glass symbols will give you a bigger or smaller view.
• Clicking the word Print at the left end of the bar will open the print dialogue box.

You get to Page Setup, where margins and orientation can be changed, by clicking this button, which is just to the right of Print on the Print Preview menu bar.

If the page is obviously not going to fit, try adjusting the margins.

Occasionally a page is so wide that you'll need to change the page orientation from Portrait to Landscape.

When you are looking at a web page, to get to Print Preview you click on the File menu and then on Print Preview.

Some web pages have a button you can click to take you to a printer friendly version. This is usually a version without extras, like menus or unnecessary pictures.

Make Your Own Copy

If you see useful information spread over too many pages, you can always copy and edit it before you print. Definitely the best way to collect recipes! Paste them all into one document, one after the other, or in categories.

• Click just before the part you want begins, hold Shift while you scroll down and click after the end of the part you want.
• Hold down the Ctrl key and tap “c”.
• Open Notepad or some other text editor, or your word processor.
• Hold down the Ctrl key and tap “v”.
• Save with a name of your choice, then edit and print.

Note, though, that pictures will not be included, and if you paste into a word processor, any links will usually be lost.

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Menu from Brothercake

12 August 2002