Now more then ever I have been reading lots and lots of content that I find on the Web. Usually if the document is under two pages I will quickly skim the document. If it is over two pages, I will print it out. I find it much easier to thoughtfully read longer text if I can hold the piece of paper in my hand and write on the page.
I have noticed a disturbing trend. Any blog entry that uses TypePad to power the blog gets butchered when you try to print it. It will typically print the first page of the post and then cut off the rest till the comments. It is just a painful user experience. It usually ends with me swearing at the printer.
For example, I wanted to print off the following blog posts so that I could read them later.
- Communities Dominate Brands > Mobile the 7th Mass Media is to internet like TV is to radio
- Global Neighbourhoods > Global Neighbourhoods Overview v4 Part 3
After printing them out a few times from the browser with no success, I was forced to copy and paste these blog entries to a Word document before I could print them out in their entirety.
Any of you out there share in my frustration?
In the comments, share your experiences. Post this on your blog. Join me in my plea. Lets get a message to the gang at SixApart that we love TypePad but we want to be able to print stuff too.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
I’ve dealt with this before, but now I can’t remember how I fixed it. It seems that the browser can’t handle a DIV that goes too long – it basically tried to print the whole DIV (in this case, the entry itself) on the first page, but it overruns the paper so you don’t see it.
It seems to happen on every TypePad blog I go to. It is darn annoying. Would it be possible to write a Grease Monkey script to fix it on the client side?
It’s not just TypePad.
I had similar frustrations when printing out websites. I had a presentation where professors wanted to compare several different websites. They wanted to view the websites on paper so we could place them next to each other..
I found a very useful tool called WebShot to automatically take a screen shot of the page. The program saves the screen shot as an image file which you can then print out. Oh, and it’s free I believe. Google it.
This program will save you a ton of time and it’s a better alternative to copying and pasting things into Word.
I’ve put together a workaround for this.