I love your newsletter, and want to print out portions that I might need and
keep those in a binder instead of in a computer folder. How do I print just a
portion?
Here I’ve been trying to go paperless, and save everything possible to disk.
I know, I’m a geek, and most people still find plain old paper the easiest,
quickest and most portable form of data storage for many things.
Rather than print out the entire document when you might want just a
portion, there are a couple of common techniques to capturing just the information you
want. Neither are pretty – in fact each leaves something or other to be desired
– but both can work.
One way or another.
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Since you mention my newsletter,
your question is most likely about email, but the general tools I’ll talk about
here apply equally well to email, web pages and other forms of document
presentation where you don’t have obvious control over everything.
I’m also going to assume that the email program, browser or other tool
you’re using doesn’t have a “Print Selection” function, or that the function is
not enabled for some reason. As reader Eric pointed out after this article was
first published, some programs allow you to simply select the portion you wish
to print, hit File, Print, and indicate that
you just wish to print the current selection.
My experience is that the function is not as ubiquitously available as we’d
like, and as we’ll see below, not enabled in Microsoft Outlook when viewing
HTML Formated email – like my newsletter.
Without “Print Selection”, there are two basic approached: printing specific
pages, or copy/pasting what you want to a different application to print.
Printing Specific Pages
Almost all programs that let you print will allow you to specify which pages
to print. By that I mean that if you have what would be an 8 page document, you
can typically choose to print only certain pages. When you select
File, Print in most applications, you’ll
typically get a print dialog that includes something like this:
This example is from Outlook, but other applications are similar. (Note the
option to print a “Selection”, which is greyed out for HTML formatted
email.)
pages, or copy/pasting what you want to a different application to
print.”
The trick is knowing which pages to print. The easiest way to do that
usually is to use Print Preview – this will display the entire
document as it would be printed, and you can determine which pages are
interesting. Once you know that, you can return to the normal
File, Print, and specify that only those
pages be printed.
Unfortunately, Outlook doesn’t support Print Preview for HTML Email, and
Print Preview isn’t available in all applications. What then?
I’ve come to really like PDFCreator, a free, open source PDF creation tool. Once installed,
it creates a virtual printer on your system. When you print to that printer,
instead of physically printing on paper, it creates a PDF file of the
result.
We can use that here for applications that don’t support Print Preview.
Instead, we print the entire document to a PDF file, then open up that PDF file
in the free Acrobat Reader, or
the free Foxit Reader (which I find
smaller, faster, and just as good).
Here’s a result of printing a recent newsletter to PDF, and then viewing
that PDF:
You can see that it’s displaying the top of page 1 of six. You can now, in
the PDF viewer, determine which page contains the information you’re interested
in, and print the page, or pages, that you care about.
That gives you control to the granularity of a page. What if you only want a
small portion, or just don’t want whatever else happens to fall on the same
page? Then things typically get just a little messier.
Literally.
Copy/Paste to your word processor
The next approach that may work involves literally copy/pasting the portion
of the document you’re interested in into another application from which you
can print. For HTML documents in particular, word processing programs such as
Microsoft Word are my tool of choice for this.
Select the text in the document you’re interested in, and copy it to the
clipboard. Here’s a portion of a recent newsletter open in Outlook, and
selected. I’ve right clicked, and it’s ready for the copy:
Now we can fire up our word processor (Microsoft Word, in this example) and
paste the results into an empty document:
There something important to note about the results – it’s not
identical to the original; some of the formatting was lost. In this
case, the indent of the first paragraph, and of course the text is wrapping
slightly differently. It’s good to note that the hyperlink in this document
survived – it’s still a hyperlink in the pasted results.
The problem here is that exactly what formatting, or in the case of images,
which images if any, survive the cut/paste process is highly dependant
on the way the email or web page was written, and the capabilities of the
application that you’re pasting into. As an extreme case, here’s that same text
pasted into Notepad instead of word:
Yes, all the information is there, but all of the formatting has been
lost.
OK, Leo, what to you do?
Well, like I said, normally I skip the printing part completely. I
frequently print to PDF documents that I then save on my computer.
But if I need “just a piece” of a specific web page or email message on
paper, I use exactly the process I outlined above using copy/paste and
Microsoft Word. While the results are often not identical to the source, it’s
typically “good enough”. If, for some reason, getting it exactly right is
important, then I’ll switch to the “print specific pages” approach.
Why didn’t my whole post go through? Trying again…
Hmmmm…. Leo? Are you awake? :)
Highlight what you want either with the mouse or with the menu bar. Select print from the menu bar. A print window appears. Look at the bottom left of the print window. Select “selection” or “current page.” Now, left click the bottom of the print menu to “print.”
Voila!
Eric
Quite awake thank you. :-)
You’ll note “Selection” a) isn’t available in all applications, and b) is greyed out greyed out in the example in the article because the application didn’t support it for the type of document being displayed.
It’s great if it works, and you’re right I should have mentioned it, but my experience has been that it’s not actually available often enough.
I’ve updated the article to reflect this. Thanks for pointing it out.
Another method that could work is getting the part of web page/e-mail that you want to print visible in your browser, then pressing Ctrl + Print Screen to copy it to the clipboard. Then open a photo editing program such as MS Paint, and paste it onto that. You can then erase the unwanted part of the web page/e-mail, and then print that document in paint! This method won’t work if you need to print more than will fit in you browser at one time, though.
Consider a screen capture utility. A freeware capture utility would probably be satisfactory but if you want all the bells and whistles buy SnagIt.
The gentleman wants to print just a PORTION of an e-mail or web page. This happens to me regularly as I do not want to print all of the clutter that sometimes acompanies an e-mail or especially a webpage.
I use an HP LaserJet black and white 2420dn printer.
The solution is simple
Highlight only the the portion that you want to print. Click on File then Print on the top menu bar. In the General tab in the Page Range area are four selections, All, Selection, Curent Page and Pages. Check Selection. Click Print.
Only the part that you have selected will be printed
I did not see the information that Eric gave and your response to him before I sent my solution. Selection and Current Page are usually greyed out. Once I select a portion that I want to print Selection will not be grayed out and can be checked. I assumed that the Page Range in the General Tab of Print was universal a part of Windows. I did not know that it is not available for all applications
As mentioned in the article, and in subsequent comments, Print Selection is not always available.
PS. Thank you Leo for doing a great service for computer owners. It is much appreciated
Help.
I print from Outlook and regardless of what size or length the email is there is always a blank page that comes out at the end. I am running on Office 2003. Is it my printer settings, page setting?
great thanks.
First a comment, then a question.
Comment: This article was one of the clearest in explanation in regard to a computer issue that I have read online.
Question: Is there anyway to highlight a section of a webpage then go further down and hightlight another section when in between the two there would be no highlighting (because I didn’t want to save the info in between the two highlighted sections)? For example when I left click and highlight a section of the page, then release the mouse, move down the page and try to highlight another section, the first section un-highlights itself.
I use Clipmarks, a Firefox extension that allows sections of webpages to be printed, emailed, saved, or posted to blog (http://clipmarks.com). If I copy and paste into a word processor, I use Google docs (http://docs.google.com) – it’s faster and easier than Word.
Canon has a printer toolbar for their printers.(avaliable on line)that allows portions of web pages to be printed. It does not work in IE 7. I have not tried it in firefox.
We use office 2007 in the office, and have lost the function to be able to highlight text adn then print just the selection as a result of this upgrade. Whilst it’s great to have some work arounds doesn’t it just been pointless that we have to do these things? Surely to be able to print selection is key in todays paper saving society!
I like to use Firefox plug-ins like “Screen Grabber” to capture a long page, however I have never been able to capture just portions of a page and I haven’t been able to get “help” to see how a plug-in works. Is this true of all plug-ins?
Thanks Leo, really helpful. Copy and paste to Word seems the least hassle. In Word I get three choices, with and without formatting and, er, something else. Important to choose the right one. I right click, select paste, and hover over the icons and click the one that gives me the output I want. Then just print from Word.