A number of readers have written to express their desire for printable blog posts. I feel your pain. If I had a nickle for every piece of paper wasted trying to print something found on a site somewhere, I’d be a rich man. On some sites, it just isn’t possible to print the content without dragging a lot of extra material. Just a little bit of material ends up consuming several printed pages and sometimes you can’t get a good printout no matter how hard you try. Yes, it’s quite frustrating.
Fortunately, it’s easy to print my blog posts without all of the extra material. Start by clicking the post title link (when viewing multiple posts in the list format). You’ll see the post presented by itself. The title text is a little larger in this format and you have the ability to add comments to the post as needed. However, look down at the Posted by entry at the bottom of the page. Next to that entry is the name of the poster (me), the date and time of the posting, and a little printer icon.
When you click the printer icon, you’re taken to another page that shows the post in plain text without any of the fancy formatting. The printer dialog for your system also opens so that you can choose a printer to use. All you need to do at this point is tell your system to print the post and you should see a plain text version appear at your printer.
I know this particular setup works well with my systems and I’ve tested it with Firefox, Chrome, and IE. However, if you encounter problems printing a post, please let me know at [email protected]. I’ll do my best to find a solution for you so that you can output the post to your printer.
