Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Internet Explorer Printing without Clipping Tool

Scott Hanselman posted today about FinePrint, which is an abstraction layer between the application and the printer driver. Your application renders the output to FinePrint's virtual printer driver, and then you can manipulate the results before they get sent to the actual printer (i.e., so that you can print multiple pages on one sheet of paper, play with margins, capture the printed output to the clipboard as a graphic, and other neat stuff).

I raised the question in the comments about whether or not a tool existed that would print web pages without the dreaded right-side clipping of text/graphics. Sure enough, there is!

Kent Chen posted this link, and he also has a blog entry describing it (which in turn, points to a blog entry, etc). Thanks for the heads-up, Kent!

IE Fitted-Width Printing: http://www.visiontech.ltd.uk/software/#IEPrint

But, the best news is that it appears that the IE7 team is working on adding this type of functionality right into Internet Explorer. AWESOME!