Print Friendly for Chrome optimizes Web pages for printing

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, printing Web pages is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get.

Well, okay, if you preview the pages first, you'll have some idea—but there's a good chance you won't like what you're gonna get. That's because most Web sites are packed with ads, banners, graphics, and other clutter that don't always translate well to the printed page. If nothing else, you can end up with lots of extraneous pages, which wastes both ink and paper.

Google Chrome extension Print Friendly & PDF lets you print smarter. Specifically, it strips out the ads and other clutter, formats the page for optimal printing, then gives you the option of removing individual elements you might not want. Oh, and true to its name, it lets you bypass paper altogether and print those pages as nicely formatted PDFs instead.

I was going to use PC World as an example, but it turns out we already give you a pretty junk-free printout. So click over to this Gizmodo page instead (Ctrl-click the link to open it in a new tab), then click Chrome's Print option (Ctrl-P). After Print Friendly & PDF

See that preview? It's kind of a mess, right? You've got unnecessary links to other stories, huge swaths of empty space, text shoehorned into a narrow column, and, at the bottom, nearly two pages' worth of comments and thumbnails.

But when you click the Print Friendly icon in your Chrome toolbar, you get a preview like the one shown here. It's in color. It lets you mouse over and delete any paragraph of text you don't want. Text spans the full width of the page, and can be adjusted in size. You can remove images. And you can create a PDF and/or e-mail the pages.

In short, it's Web-page printing the way it should be. Print Friendly & PDF will save you time, paper, and ink, and on those merits alone, it's a must-have addition to Chrome.

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Posted at 02:23 |  by Unknown

How to get a full-screen Gmail compose window every time

We talked about Gmail's spiffy new inbox-sorting tabs. Today let's look at another new feature, one that's just starting to roll out to users: a full-screen new-message window.

By default, when you click Gmail's Compose button, you get a window that appears in the right corner of the screen.

Now there's a new option. In the top-right corner of that Compose window, you'll see three icons: Minimize, Full-screen, and Close. Clicking that middle one enlarges the window, though the description "full-screen" is a little disingenuous here: you actually get a larger, centered window that darkens the background.

At least, that's how it appears on my system, which runs at 1,920 x 1,080. If you have a lower-resolution screen, the window may indeed seem closer to full-screen. (Anyone running, say, a 1,366 x 768 display? Hit the comments and let your fellow readers know if the window really is "full-screen," or still just bigger and centered.)

In any case, I greatly prefer that enlarged Compose window, and want it to appear every time I write a message--without me having to click the aforementioned icon.

Fortunately, it's easy to make this the default:

1. After you click Compose, look for the little arrow in the lower-right corner of the Compose window.

2. Click that arrow, then choose Default to full-screen.

That's it! Now you'll get the big window every time. If you decide you prefer the smaller window, just repeat the process.

Speaking of which, which size do you prefer: big or small?

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Posted at 05:21 |  by Unknown