"Printing" Web Pages

How often have you wanted to use a website for class or to share a web article with a parent or colleague and hesitate because too much "stuff" is splayed all over the page? Well, hesitate no more. There are several tools that help with this, but my two favorite are Print What You Like and Joliprint.

Print What You Like is a web tool that allows you select what you want to print, and eliminate the unwanted content on a page. Simply go to the link, enter the URL of the page you want to modify, select what you want to print and remove what you don't - what you select will highlight in yellow (see picture below), you can either isolate what you select and print that, or you can delete everything you don't want and print what is remaining. You choose whatever content on the page you would like to print!  Once the content you want to print/share is all that is left, you can either print the page or save it as a pdf using the option box on the left.

Joliprint is a little bit different. In Joliprint you enter the URL and Joliprint automatically converts the content of the page into a magazine-like pdf. You have multiple choices to how you want to store and/or share the creation (see below).  The "copy the link" option makes it very easy to share the creations on a web page or a blog. Click here to see a link to a joliprint pdf I just created from this article on Wired Magazine: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/api-copyright/. Joliprint also allows you to create a free account and store the documents you create on the account.

• For those of you that use bookmarklets, there is a Print What You Like bookmarklet and a Joliprint bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks toolbar. There is also a bookmarklet for Safari on the iPad.

So which one do I prefer? Well the ease of use of Joliprint is amazing and the magazine-like pages are appealing, but sometimes that isn't what I want. Sometimes I just want a small piece of a page, and sometimes I just want it to be a linear block of text, not a magazine. Print What You Like can be a little frustrating in the beginning when you are learning to delete unwanted content or isolating what you do want. Once you play for a bit, it becomes fairly easy. So my answer, as usual, is that my preference comes down to what I am looking to do with the tool. Once I have decided that, I decide which of the two tools to use.

Have fun, and if you have any questions, just let me know!