Apr 17 2007 at 1:04pm
How to Make Any Web Page Print Nicely in Opera
After all my troubles and rants about print stylesheets the other day I finally thought of a better way to make web pages printable: soure editing editing in Opera! This is a really simple and easy way to make a web page look the way you want it to for one-time viewing and printing.
Here’s how to do it:
- Load the web site and view source
- Find the beginning of the article (the first headline), and remove all the HTML code between the headline and the <body> tag.
- Find the end of the article (the last paragraph), and remove everything between it and the </body> tag.
- Click “Apply Changes” button from the source viewer tab menu. Your web page will reload with your changes applied.
- If you know CSS, go back to the source viewer and add any extra rules to make the page appear the way you want it to. Sometimes this will be necessary because of the way the original site was designed. If the page doesn’t display right after you’ve removed the HTML code, try removing any lines at the top that start with <link rel=”. Apply changes again.
That’s it. Now all you have to do is print normally and the page will have just the text you need! I imagine there is a way to do this with the web developer plugin for Firefox but I don’t use that very much so I don’t know how it works. Please explain if you do!
Note: I believe the “Apply Changes” button was added to the view source window in more recent versions of Opera (9.0 or 9.2). If you are using an older version you can try the reload from cache command or just upgrade to 9.2.
P.S. Apparently cranky ranting is going around these days. I guess I’m not the only one!
