MacinSpot

There comes a time in just about everyone’s life when a web page is stumbled upon with good information, but maybe you don’t want to print 30 pages just to have the little piece of information that you are looking for. Let me show you how to print just some highlighted text so you can avoid using all of your printer ink. I am pretty sure this works the same for Tiger as it does for Leopard, but if you run into differences, please post your comments below!

The first part of this will be based around Firefox. Below I will write about Safari as you have to do this a little differently with Apple’s web browser.

Firefox:

Make the selection you would like:



Then go to the file menu and select print rather than hitting any print buttons. Most print buttons start the print job automatically, but if you would like to print a selection of text, you must first tell your printer what you want. So go to file, then select print:



The print dialogue pops up and you will see in this screen shot towards the bottom next to “Options” a check box next to “Print Selection Only.” Make sure that check box is checked. The screen shot below is only of the upper half of the print dialogue box.



Now click the print button in the bottom right corner. Your highlighted text should be the only information on the page that just printed.

Safari:

Highlight the text you would like to print and then go to the Safari menu, Services, and select “Make New Sticky Note” on the Services sub menu. This is a handy little feature.



A new sticky note will pop up with the text you highlighted. It will look like this:



Now go to the file menu and select “Print Active Note…”



Select print on the print dialogue box that pops up. This is feature is pretty cool if you want to print many pieces of information from one web page of many web pages. You will see in the screen shot above the option right below “Print Active Note…” the ability to “Print All Notes…” If you highlight more text on another web page and make a new sticky note from that, you can keep doing this over and over until you have all of the information you want on several different sticky notes. Then choose the “Print All Notes…” feature. Apple lays out all of your sticky notes on one piece of paper(or however many sheets it may take to consolidate your sticky notes)in a nice neat orderly fashion. This is awesome if you have a good bit of information but you do not want to print one paragraph per sheet.

Thanks for reading!