Besides picturing a room in which nothing is in its proper place, to me the word ‘mess’ connotes web pages which are thickly dotted with those magical money-making ‘patches’ of different sizes and colours.
But what can one do when you need to print a page which is so stuffed with ads? You are lucky if the site offers a ‘printer-friendly’ version, but what if it does not? Either you would go for the layman’s trick of copying the material and pasting it in a word processor or you just bear those ‘non grata’ ads in your printouts. And while the former is a consuming job, the latter, besides costing you, is harmful for the environment as it will consume more pages than needed. Hence, we need another solution which will be both less time and tree consuming, in other words, give us the authority to print what we like.
Enter printwhatyoulike.com. The genie-like website will print only what you choose from the chock-a-block page, be it only an image or just a paragraph from a lengthy post of a blog. It is all in your hands.
With quite a simplified layout, the website claims, at the top of the site to be saving both money and the environment. All you have to do is to enter the URL of the page you want to print and hit ‘Start’. Alternatively, the site offers itself for a trial and gives a direct link where you can ‘format’ the page as you like.
When you have entered the URL in the box provided, it will take you to the ‘print preview’ with a left panel containing different tools to edit the page. If the page has a lot of stuff and you only need a few things, you can select them and click ‘isolate’ button on the left panel which will remove other things and give you the page with the material you chose.
But, if there is a site or blog which you want to print without ads and other ‘distractions’, simply click on what you want to be removed and click ‘remove’. Apart from this, the website also gives you a facility of decreasing the font size and changing the font face.
Furthermore, the option of merging many pages in one place gives you the opportunity of printing the contents of two or more pages in one print. For example, while you are formatting some site, you can click ‘Add Page’ and enter www.dawn.net. It will make the latter’s content appear below the former, making it appear as a single page. Once you are done with the editing, you can also save it in HTML and PDF versions. Hey, doesn’t it make the site really useful?
However, the site has a couple of drawbacks. While it has the options of ‘undo’ and ‘redo’, I really missed a ‘reset’ button that can be used when needed. And a more serious flaw is that when we add another page or website, the first one adopts the newly-added page, making the first one look disfigured with fonts and images displaced from their original locations. This, somehow, I felt, blurs the charm.
The website can also be used as a type of game in which you can ‘play’ with different websites and blogs and give them a new look.
So, go ahead and PrintWhatYouLike.com.
