Enable Printable View on Any Website with Aardvark Firefox Add-On
January 29, 2008 – 12:49 pmA printable view is a special view used for printing a website without all the annoying banners or advertisements inside it. Pages in website like Yahoo! comes with the “Printable View” icon that you can click to go to another page that shows only the news content, thus making it easy for us to print it on paper.
The problem is that most of the websites (especially blogs) does not have a convenient “Printable View” button to support print viewing. To enable print view on any website available out there, Aardvark Firefox Add-On comes to the rescue.
There are two ways to use Aardvark Firefox Add-On:
- If you are a casual user, you can remove any elements on a web page (banners, advertisements, category blocks etc.) prior to printing the web page on paper.
- If you are web developer / designer, you can see how the website was built block by block, element by element. You can also view the codes of any particular HTML element that you want.
Sticking to the purpose of this post, I will show you how to create a printable view of a site that doesn’t support print-viewing. For web developers, go figure your own thingy - you will surely love this extension!
How to Print Any Website in Printable View
In this post, I will show you how to print a simple blog post in print view. For self promotion, I will use my own blog post for this tutorial 
.
1- First and foremost, install Aardvark Firefox extension. Restart your Mozilla Firefox once its done to activate it.
2- Open this post on Beginner’s Guide to Install PHP, MySQL and Apache. You will see some amazingly valuable information there and I encourage that you subscribe to it’s RSS feed. Hahaha.
3- Right-click on the page and click on “Start Aardvark“. You can make sure that Aardvark is running if the web page shows some red rectangles when you move your mouse around.
4- Press “h” to view all of Aardvark settings. For this tutorial, you are going to isolate the page content from the other elements.
5- Move your mouse cursor until you can select only the blog content as shown below.
6- With your mouse still selecting the area, tap “i” on your keyboard to get a print view of the post. “i” will isolate the element from its original web page. The result is a nice printable view of the web page.
7- However, there are still some ads inside the page! To remove elements like this one, move your mouse cursor on top of it until a red rectangle appears and tap the “r” key to remove it.
Done! Now you can print the website content without all the unnecessary hassles.
Aardvark is one of the best Firefox add-on that I’ve ever used. It easily removes unnecessary elements of a web page in few simple shortcuts. I found the “i” key particularly the most useful and the quickest way to isolate printable contents from other elements of a web page. If you are a web designer, don’t miss the Aardvark Firefox extension - it can save your time to check out how other designers built their page, block by block!
[ via Amir Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration ]
p/s in case you don’t know what an Aardvark is, check out here.
Tags: firefox plugin, firefox add-on, firefox extension, printable view, print view, print webpage
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3 Responses to “Enable Printable View on Any Website with Aardvark Firefox Add-On”
First time I have seen a similar feature in Scrapbook (DOM eraser) but it is good to see a separate extension specifically designed for the purpose(with more features).
By Jawwad on Jan 30, 2008
By Syahid A. on Jan 30, 2008