Printer-Hostile Web Pages? OpenOffice.org To The Rescue
A while back (840 days ago, to be exact) I blogged about the NVU HTML authoring tool and its use in reformatting and printing printer-hostile web pages.
Well, NVU 1.0 was released in June 2005. And I have been using it to good effect. However, for some reason, NVU development stopped, and the download site still shows a binary for Fedora Core 3, even though the current version of Fedora Core is FC6. And I couldn't find NVU in FC6's own yum repository. I could download the distribution-agnostic version, but that would mean I have to untar it and then create a launcher icon for it by myself. It's no big deal, but like recompiling Linux kernels (which I did back in the pre-1.0 days), it gets old really fast.
So, I'm looking for an easier way. Just by luck, I clicked on the OpenOffice.org Writer icon on my quick launch bar, which has always been there since the pre-Fedora days, and pasted some random HTML into it. And guess what? It took it.
So until every web site out there becomes printer-friendly, I'll be using OpenOffice.org Writer to compensate. Here's OOo Writer in action, formatting this page:
Re: Printer-Hostile Web Pages? OpenOffice.org To The Rescue
The first is an excellent plugin called 'Nuke Anything Enhanced" that lets you to right-click on a specific object on the page and choose a menu item to simply make it disappear. A few clicks to remove ads, unwanted columns and the like are usually enough to make it printable. It also has a neat feature that lets you undo your last remove, just in case you got carried away and removed something important.
The second way is something I just realized the other day. Often, I just want to print a tiny portion of a page -- maybe just one or two interesting sentences from an otherwise boring document. I went off hunting for a 'print selected text' plug-in but found that it's already built into Firefox. Just select some text with your mouse and then go to File...Print and choose 'selection' in the dialog.