Three Ways to Save Ink & Paper When You Print

Take a look around a network printer in most schools and you'll find a pile of discarded paper. That discarded paper is often the result of someone printing way more than they needed to. For example, I once caught a student printing all 33 pages of an article when all he really wanted was about two paragraphs out of the article. It was then that I decided that I needed to teach my students about conserving paper when they print.

The easiest way to save paper is to simply make sure that you're only printing what you need. When the print dialogue box pops-up select a specific page or two to print rather than using the default "print all pages" found on most printers.

Printliminator is a handy little bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Printliminator allows you to highlight a webpage and select only the elements which you wish to print. You can install Printliminator in seconds by just clicking and dragging it into your browser's toolbar. Watch the video below to see how it works.


Evernote users can use the Evernote web clipper to save and print articles that have sidebar content removed from them. To use this option simply open the Evernote web clipper in your browser then select "simplified article."

Clean Print Helps You Save Ink and Paper

Clean Print is a free browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari (including Safari on the iPad). The purpose of Clean Print is to help you save ink and paper when printing articles from the Internet. Clean Print allows you to remove images and advertisements from pages before printing and article. Clean Print also gives you the option to increase or decrease font size before printing an article. Learn more about Clean Print in the video below.


Applications for Education
If you use it and you can get others in your school to use it, Clean Print can help you maximize your school's printing supplies budget. If Clean Print isn't for you, give one of these other ink saving tools a try.