Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
carpe demi

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

user:
pass:
register,


               

Please log in.
Before you can vote, you need to register. Please log in or create an account.

Paper Saver Print Driver

Save paper and staples with smart printing
  (+4)
(+4)
  [vote for,
against]

Build into a print driver the ability to recognize that your printout is going have a page at the end with a single line of text on it. When this happens it will give you the option to stop and trim out some lines and print again. Even better it could have an auto trim feature that will find standard "clutter" and give you the option to take these out (e.g. Email headers; advertizement bars from web pages; blank lines; "Do you Yahoo?"; etc) Driver settings would allow you to set how many lines would cause the exception processing.
blahginger, Sep 27 2002

[link]






       This is a good idea. A good way to save a lot of paper now, while people are off re-writing drivers to conform to the blahginger spec, is to use printers that print duplex (and to take the time to tick the "print duplex" box when you are printing).   

       Amazingly enough, this one simple thing cuts paper squandering by roughly, oh, about 50%.   

       Even my cheap HP ink jet at home prints duplex and virtually all the laser printers at work do as well.
bristolz, Sep 28 2002
  

       You could set the widow and orphan controls in your word processing program, though I guess you're really talking about printing web pages.   

       I almost always print out only the first page of a web site (something it's easy to do in all the popular browsers), to address this very problem. Once in a while, I need to go back and print out the second page too, because the first page didn't capture it all, but that's worth the saved paper and wear-and-tear.
DrCurry, Sep 28 2002
  

       This is really not a print driver issue so much as it's an issue of designing a web browser with a halfway decent print formatting routine. Something that could also scale pages which have logical minimum widths so that they wouldn't simply run off the paper would be good also.
supercat, Sep 28 2002
  

       [austere] Excellent Suggestion!! This is exactly the sort of thing that I want to do. Will defintely cut down on my wasted paper.
blahginger, Oct 05 2002
  

       Print preview anyone?
brackish, Dec 10 2003
  

       There used to be a great program Called HP Printsmart for web printing. Allowed you to do almost exactly what your asking for and some other cool things as well). Although no longer supported by HP I am pretty sure it is still available somewhere.
I run it on all my machines and it works well. I can say that it runs flawlessly on Win95, all Win98 versions and Win2K pro (probably that abortion ME as well). Haven't tried runnig it yet on any XP machines (any version) because I do not own one.
Also this lets you fetch, view and print linked pages without having to actually go to them, uses a tree structure like Windows Explorer to show the linked pages and content.
Oh yes, works with Netscape, Mozilla and I.E. 6
soundman, Dec 10 2003
  

       Or Canon EasyWebPrint
-----, Nov 05 2004
  
      
[annotate]
  


 

back: main index

business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle