Print What You Like

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Easier Way to Make Your Website Printer Friendly

Now it is even easier to use PrintWhatYouLike to generate a printer friendly format for your site!  The print button will now automatically format your site for printing.  Just select the button you would like to include on your site and copy the print button code to your site. It’s that simple! Get the print button for your website

If you don’t like how PrintWhatYouLike automatically formats your site, you can customize how your site is formatted for printing with the PrintWhatYouLike editor.

3 Comments June 25th, 2009 by Cassie

Make Your Website Printer Friendly

Making your website printer friendly is kind of like flossing – everyone knows you’re supposed to do it, but few people bother because it’s such a pain.  Now you can use PrintWhatYouLike to generate a printer friendly format for your site!  No programming knowledge is required, and it only takes a couple minutes.

Here’s how it works: 1) Use the PWYL editor to format a page on your site for printing. 2) Copy the print button code to your blog. 3) When a reader clicks the button on your site, your changes will be applied to the page the reader is viewing, rendering it for print.

In addition to providing your readers with a nicely formatted page for printing, there are also options to save the page as a PDF, customize the page, and undo all the changes.

Add the button to your own site here: www.printwhatyoulike.com/print_button

2 Comments June 16th, 2009 by Cassie

Introducing PrintWhatYouLike Pro!

We just released a new version of PrintWhatYouLike with some great additional features!

Change Sets

Now you can save the changes you make in PrintWhatYouLike and reapply those changes on other pages.  For example, if you print lots of recipes from a website, you can save the set of changes it takes to make the recipe print nicely.  The next time you need to print a recipe, just apply your changes.  This is a great way to save time and easily make any web page printer friendly.

Clips

Do you compile bits and pieces of information from lots of different web pages?  Usually, you will try to paste the parts of the web page into a Word document, but the formatting gets all messed up.  I have to do this when I make handouts for my Girl Scout troop, and it is a real pain.  With PrintWhatYouLike Pro, you can save snippets of web pages and easily compile them together into one document for printing.  Since you do it all from browser, the formatting is preserved, and your document will look great when it is printed.

Track Savings

Now you can track how much money you are saving! PrintWhatYouLike tracks your savings in pages saved, money saved, trees saved, and CO2 saved

Accounts

Since the new features require saving information, you will need to sign up for an account to use the new features.  You can try out the new features by signing up for a Free Trial Account.  You can save two change sets and six clips with a Free Trial Account.  If you really like the new features, you can upgrade to a Pro account for $5/month and save unlimited change sets and clips!

1 Comment May 21st, 2009 by Cassie

PageZipper – read more, click less

We just released a bunch of new features for PageZipper!  Viewing image galleries is now a breeze, and Firefox users can enjoy the Firefox Extension.

PageZipper takes articles which have been split into multiple pages and merges them back to one.  So when you get to the bottom of an article, instead of clicking “Next” and staring off into space for 5 seconds while the page loads,  just keep on reading.  PageZipper will get the next page and add it to the bottom of the page you’re on.

PageZipper is most useful on image galleries.  IMHO image galleries that put each image on a seperate page are a blight on the human race.  Have you ever been on a gallery that’s so slow you actually click “next” as soon as the page loads, because you will be done viewing the image before the next page loads??  Well PageZipper makes photo galleries work the way nature intended. Just click control down. PageZipper will automatically center the next image in your browser.  Continue clicking control down to view the remaining images.  Press control-up to view the previous image.  PageZipper takes care of figuring out which images are part of the gallery, and which pages needs to load to get those images.  It even resizes any images which are too big to fit in your browser without scrolling.  All you need to do is press control-down.

Cassie made a super cool video showing how all this works here: http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper

PageZipper also seems to have been noticed by the web.  It’s been on the pwyl site since December without hardly catching a glance.  But a few days ago twitter user @steverubel mentioned it, and since then its been spreading like wildfire.  Here are some good write-ups:  cnet webware and Technology Bites I love how the internet works like that.

8 Comments March 31st, 2009 by Jonathan

Support for Internationalized URLs

PrintWhatYouLike gets a lot of traffic from outside the US, and we found that many users were unable to use PrintWhatYouLike on sites that have international characters in the URL.  For example, Wikipedia has versions of its free encyclopedia in many different languages, and the URLs for the articles include international characters, such as http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/??????.  In addition, some sites have internationalized domain names, such as http://www.hören.at.  We have added support for internationalized URLs, so go print articles from Wikipedia in any language you want!

Comments Off on Support for Internationalized URLs March 5th, 2009 by Jonathan

Better customer service with getsatisfaction.com

We love hearing from you!  That is why we signed up with getsatisfication.com to help us connect with our users and provide better customer service.  The Contact link on our homepage now has a form for you to send us your ideas, questions, problems, or just to chat.

Although we have answers to a lot of the commonly asked questions on our Help page, you may have a question that isn’t there.   You can now send us your question directly from the Help page and we will try to answer for you.  Then, if someone else has the same question, they can search for it on the Help page and find the answer.

2 Comments February 26th, 2009 by Cassie

Use Ecofont to beat the ink-jet racket

Ink for inkjets now costs $8000!!!! a gallon. Manufacturers sell you the printers cheap, then overcharge on the ink to make back the money.

But you can beat them and keep your $$$ by being thrifty with ink. PrintWhatYouLike now makes this easier by integrating Ecofont. EcoFont is a really innovative font designed to reduce the amount of ink it takes to print text. It does this by including tiny holes in the characters. If you select Ecofont and then crank up the text size, you can actually see the holes! Just like Swiss Cheese. According to Ecofont’s creators, SPRANQ, it can reduce your ink consumption up to 20%!! Although a quick google search will find lots of people questioning this conclusion. It can’t hurt, and it seems logical that adding whitespace to the letters will reduce your ink usage. So try it out!

You can use Ecofont even if you don’t have it installed on your computer. Go to “Font Type” and select Ecofont. On Safari, IE, Firefox 3.1, and Opera 10 it will just work!  On all other browsers you will have to install Ecofont the old fashioned way.

For legal and technical reasons, Ecofont isn’t available in the bookmarklet 🙁

More info on Ecofont: http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html

1 Comment February 25th, 2009 by Jonathan

New live twitter feed

We love hearing what people are saying about PrintWhatYouLike!  That is why we added a live twitter feed to our homepage featuring the most recent tweets about PrintWhatYouLike instead of those fake, glowing testimonials you will see on other websites that say, “This product changed my life – I would recommend it to all my friends”.

Also, PrintWhatYouLike is on twitter, so check us out: http://twitter.com/pwyl

Comments Off on New live twitter feed February 25th, 2009 by Cassie

New features poll!

We have lots of great ideas for new features for PrintWhatYouLike.  Unfortunately, we can’t implement all the new features at once, so we need your help!  Can you take our poll and let us know which new feature you would like to be implemented first?

[polldaddy poll=1375824]

4 Comments February 16th, 2009 by Cassie

Site Redesign, New Resize Feature, and Improved Help

You may have noticed that PrintWhatYouLike looks a bit different now!  We worked with a great web designer to come up with a fresh, fun, new look for the site.  The process by which we came up with the new design was interesting.  We set up a contest on 99designs.com and received submissions from designers all over the world.  In the end, we picked the design we liked the most.  Could you tell that the old site design was done by programmers? 🙂

We also added a new feature that allows you to resize any element on the page.  This feature is great for:

  • Reducing the size of big images that you want to print
  • Compressing elements that have a lot of whitespace

We expanded the help on the toolbar so that it explains more than just the keyboard shortcuts.  On the toolbar, there is a question mark at the top of each grouping of buttons.  Clicking on the question mark will display the help section for each of the commands.  We also have a new Help page that should answer most of your questions.  If you were ever confused about how something worked, go check out the new Help page!  If you have any other questions you would like answered in the Help section. send us an email.

Side note: We changed a couple of the keyboard shortcuts so that they are more intuitive.  The keyboard shortcut for More is now M, and the keyboard shortcut for Less is now L.  We also removed the keyboard shortcuts for the page level commands, Remove Background and Remove Images.

3 Comments February 16th, 2009 by Cassie