Number 203 - April 2000

Printing Only Select Parts Of A Web Page
by James C. Smith - NOCCC - January 2000 JamesCSmith@BigFoot.com
Web pages often have some useful information on them that I want to print out but the page also has extra information, advertising, or legal notices, for which I would rather not waste paper. It is easy to print just the part or parts of the page you want and skip all the extra noise.     I use Internet Explorer 5 as my primary web browser. If you use an older version, or if you use Netscape, these options may or may not work.     Often I only want to print a section of a web page and skip parts like the banner advertisement at the top or side bar with links to other pages. I just want the information in the middle of the page. You can select the information to be printed by clicking and dragging the mouse over the area to select it. Then select Print from the File menu1. In the print dialog there is a section called print range. In this section, select Selection. Now only the selected (highlighted) part of the web page will be printed.     The above works fine if the information you want to print is all on one page and is all together. But if you want one thing from the top of a page and another from the bottom and you want to skip the stuff in the middle then the above will not help. Or maybe the	information you want to print is spread across multiple web pages. In cases like these, I use copy and paste to copy the parts of the page(s) I want and paste them into a blank document and then print that document. You could use a web page editing program to do this but I find that a word processor such as MS Word works just as well. I just highlight a section of a web page and hit copy (from the edit menu or the keyboard shortcut -C). Then I open Word and hit paste. Then I go back to the web page, select something else, and hit copy again. Then I go back to Word and paste again. Keep repeating this until everything I need is in my word document. Then simply hit print in Word.     Word will copy all the graphics and formatting from the web page. If you would rather ignore the formatting and just extract the plain text from the web page, you can pull down the Edit menu in Word and select Paste Special. A window will appear with a list of formats. Select Unformatted Text and you will just get the plain text and no fonts, sizes, colors, tables, or graphics.     1 Do NOT select Print from the menu bar across the top of the Explorer screen window. That will print the whole page. Select File, then Print, then Selection, then OK.
Number 203 - April 2000