Printing the content of a website without leaving menus, advertisements, or comments was once a real challenge. PrintWhatYouLike has long served as a reference thanks to its visual editor which allows you to hide any unwanted area before sending to the printer.
In recent years, Modern browsers, however, offer equally effective selective printing functions. Features include reading mode, preview with fine-tuning, direct export to PDF, and scaling control. PrintWhatYouLike remains relevant for very precise manual cleanup, but you can often achieve equivalent results without leaving Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.
Print only what you want with PrintWhatYouLike
So, the big advantage of PrintWhatYouLike is that beyond allowing you to print an entire web page, you will benefit from lots of features allowing you to print what you want and just what you want… But it also allows you to modify a lot of things to make the result of your print more readable! Because often, printing a web page means displaying a bit of text and lots of useless things: ads, menus, social sharing elements, comments… In short, a lot of parasites!
Another huge advantage of this tool is that it is free and 100% online.
To get started, go to PrintWhatYouLike and enter the URL of the web page you want to print… It will then open in the utility and you will be able to modify and configure quite a few things.
In fact, all areas as well as sub-areas of the web page are selectable. Each time you select an area, a menu will open with the following options:
- Isolate (isolated) : allows you to see only the selected area. Everything else disappears.
- Remove (remove) : deletes the selected area (useful for removing ads, for example)
- To broaden (widen) : allows you to widen a column that is too narrow so that it fits the entire width of the page (useful if you come across an article on a very narrow column that suddenly takes up several pages)
- resize (resize) : This option gives you the possibility to resize the area as you wish using the mouse.
- Save the excerpt (save clip) : to save only a small piece of the page, requires creating a free account
- Select more/Select less (select more/select less) : allows you to extend the area selected by the editing tool by integrating nearby areas.
Additionally, on the toolbar on the left, you also have the option to:
- Hide page background
- Hide all images on the fly
- Remove page margins
- Change text size
- Change the text font
Or finally, if you are a bit lazy, there is a "Format" button that will automatically clean the page for you. This button only keeps the essentials and the result is rather effective as you can see below (from an article about SwissTransfer and sharing large files)!
The cherry on the cake is that if you make a mistake in something, PrintWhatYouLike keeps a history of your changes and you can undo or redo any of the things you've changed at any time (undo / redo).
Print a web page to PDF or HTML
Finally, once your page is ready, you have other useful options:
- Add another page (useful if you want to compile multiple URLs)
- Print your work (Yes, that's the goal of this site... but the button is there)
- Save as PDF or HTML, useful if you want to keep the page in electronic form (but does not always work very well… printing in PDF is more efficient)
Anyway, I'm pretty glad I stumbled upon it PrintWhatYouLike and since I discovered it, I use it every day. Very easy to use for a really good result, even if the rendering is not always perfect... What more could you ask for?
