Cleaning Up a Webpage for Printing the Easy Way

You’ve found a page on a website with just the information you are looking for. You print the page just to discover the text gets cut off or shrunk until it is too small to read because there is a bunch of other junk on the page.

The Clippable Bookmarklet removes all the junk from a webpage and retains the formatting of the main text so you can print it out nicely.

Installing Clippable in Firefox

Clippable is easy to install in Firefox. Navigate to the Clippable Bookmarklet webpage at http://brettterpstra.com/share/readability2.html. The link for Clippable is at the bottom of the page.

Drag the Clippable box up to your Bookmarks toolbar.

The Clippable button displays on your toolbar providing you with one-click, clean printing of webpages.

Installing Clippable in Internet Explorer

Adding Clippable to Internet Explorer is a little more complicated. You can’t just drag the button to a toolbar. You need to add a favorite and then edit it to insert the code from the shortcut.

Go to the Clippable webpage at http://brettterpstra.com/share/readability2.html.

Select Add to Favorites from the Bookmarks menu to add the Clippable webpage as a bookmark.

The Add a Favorite dialog box displays.

Change the Name to Clippable, if desired, and click Add.

Now you need to copy the shortcut for the Clippable button. To do this, right-click on the Clippable button and select Copy Shortcut from the pop-up menu.

Now you will paste the shortcut you just copied into the favorite you created. Select Organize Favorites from the Favorites menu.

The Organize Favorites dialog box displays. Right-click on the Clippable Favorite and select Properties from the pop-up menu.

The Clippable Properties dialog box displays. Replace the text in the URL edit box with the shortcut text you copied from the Clippable button, click Apply, and then click OK.

You are returned to the Organize Favorites dialog box. Click Close.

Using Clippable

As an example, we went to a help topic on Microsoft’s website on working with Remote Desktop Connection using Firefox. Here’s a part of the webpage as it comes up normally.

Click the Clippable button on the toolbar in Firefox (or select Clippable from the Favorites menu in Internet Explorer), and all the excess items go away, leaving you with just the nicely formatted article and related pictures ready for printing.

You can also copy and paste the article into your favorite note-taking or word-processing software for future reference without losing the formatting.

by Lori Kaufman