Printing from blogs and other long pages

2009-06-24 08:07 AM Category Beginner | Intermediate | Printing | Safari

I gave our old PowerBook to my 90 year old aunt several months ago. This has been a true adventure for her as she had never really used a computer before. Actually, I gave her the computer, an older AirPort Extreme, a printer and even an iSight camera. Aunt Lee lives in California--and I am in Virginia, so we have used iChat screen sharing many times as I teach her more about her computer.

The other day I sent her a link to one of my favorite blogs, Bakerella. If you have not seen it and you enjoy baking or cake decorating, this is a wonderful site. Aunt Lee discovered a recipe for Lemon Bars. Of course, she needed a printout to use while she cooked.

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In the case of Bakerella, there are often lots of photos along with a recipe, so we have only fixed half of the problem. Printing out all of the photos along with the recipe would just be a waste of ink, so now we need to isolate the text.

One way to do that would be to use the preview function of Safari. Go to the Safari File menu and select Print…:

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The Print dialog box will open. It may appear like this one:

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This is called a simplified dialog box--and I detest them! The little arrow button that I have circled is a called a disclosure triangle. Whenever you see a button like this that points downward, click it and you will have a more detailed and much more useful dialog box:

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In this one, you can scroll through the web page using the arrows under the preview to find just the part that you will want to print. Then enter those numbers in the right side of the dialog box using the “From” choice instead of All. Enter the number of the first page you would like to print. Then move to the second or “to:” box. The number that you typed into the first box will automatically appear. If you would like to print more than one page, simply erase the number in the “to:” box and enter the desired page number.

There is no way to skip a few pages. If you wanted to print page five and page seven, you would have to first print page five, then use the “Print…” command to choose page seven. Using this method you can print out just the pages you want.

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If you would like to save the pages, click the PDF button at the left bottom of the dialog box:

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Choose a location for the file. You may also want to give it a specific name:

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While there are many other ways to print and save specific parts of a web page, this is probably the easiest method. If you would like to learn other ways of working with web pages, consider booking a tutorial session with us at Dr. Mac Consulting! The cost is $60 per hour and we will tailor the session to meet your needs and interests. We use our special screen-sharing software to see your screen and we can even control your keyboard and mouse if you need an extra hand!

Happy recipe hunting!

Pat

Tags: Internet, Safari, PDF