When you want to print a website page or article, you regularly end up with an extended print area that includes almost all the extraneous elements you can find on a page: advertisements, menus, related content, share buttons… In short, it is very rare to be able to print ONLY what you are interested in.
That's precisely what it's for PrintFriendly : clean a web page before printing it or saving it as a PDF, in order to avoid sacrificing three ink cartridges to keep a two-page article.
The principle is very simple. PrintFriendly analyzes the page, removes a good part of what clutters it and then lets you clean it up as you wish.
How to use PrintFriendly
To take advantage of PrintFriendly, you can use the extension or go directly to the website.
If you use Chrome, you can install the official PrintFriendly extension from the Chrome Web Store. A button will then appear in your browser, allowing you to launch the tool directly from the page you are viewing. The extension also works with several browsers based on Chromium, such as Brave, Opera, Vivaldi or Arc.
Otherwise, there's no need to install anything: simply go to the PrintFriendly website and paste the address of the page to be cleaned.
Once the page loads, PrintFriendly already does a good part of the cleanup: ads, menus, Pop-up windows and other navigation elements disappear. You can then manually remove the blocks that do not interest you, delete images, change the text size or adjust the content before moving on to the next step.
Then all that's left is to print the result on paper or save it as a PDF. With the extension, you can also capture the entire page. PrintFriendly now even offers editing and highlighting features within its interface.
Practical for saving a tutorial, a recipe, a long article or a reference document without having to retrieve around it the fifteen reading suggestions, the banners and half the site with them.
Is this really useful with current browsers?
Browsers already know how to do part of the job.
Chrome, of course, allows you to print a page or save it as a PDF and offers some settings in its print window, particularly for margins, backgrounds, and headers and footers. However, it doesn't really allow you to delete unwanted parts with the mouse before printing.
Firefox goes a step further with its "Simplified" mode and reading mode, which can remove much of the formatting from certain articles before printing. However, this option depends on the page being viewed: not all pages are compatible.
Safari also has its Reader mode, which removes menus and other distractions from certain articles while allowing you to adjust the font and its size. Again, Safari must recognize the page as a compatible article.
Where PrintFriendly remains practical is that you can really clean up the page and decide what will remain in the final version.
In short, PrintFriendly is a very simple utility, but particularly practical as soon as a site decides that your print job also deserves its menu, its ads, its article suggestions and its fifty buttons.
This will save some ink, a few sheets of paper, and above all, avoid ending up with PDFs that look like... website screenshots taken the day after a party.
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