Shrink to Fit for Webpages, or How to Avoid the Right Margin Cutoff

The Wisconsin State Law Library sends out a monthly online newsletter with some great techie tips (in addition to lots of other good--but mostly Wisconsin-related--legal research information). Heidi Yelk wrote a particularly helpful tip for their April 2006 newsletter (http://wsll.state.wi.us/newsletter/0604.html) and has kindly given me permmission to re-post it for you all.

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Tech Tip in Brief -- Heidi Yelk
Shrink to Fit for Webpages, or How to Avoid the Right Margin Cutoff

Q: Printing from webpages should be easy, but lately I’ve been struggling with a problem I call, for lack of a better term, the right margin cutoff. This occurs when the page I am viewing looks normal on the screen, but when I print it, the last few characters of each line are missing, leaving incomplete words and phrases all the way down the right side of the page. Wasted paper and frustration ensue, usually in proportion to the size of the document. What can be done?

A: The most obvious solution is to comb the webpage for a “printer friendly” or “print this page” link. Many news outlets offer this option. It formats the text to fit an 8 1/2 x 11 page while also stripping away the banner ads and other unrelated content. But not all webpages have this feature.

Your next option might be to copy and paste the text from the webpage into a word processing program. And yet another option is to change the page setup to print using landscape, rather than portrait, orientation. But these last two solutions are really just workarounds that leave something to be desired.

There is something easier: “Shrink to Fit” for webpages. Several “alternative” web browsers, including Firefox and Netscape, currently offer this feature. As the name implies, text on webpages is scaled to fit the 8 1/2 x 11 page, completely eliminating the right margin cutoff. By accessing the “print preview” option in Firefox, users can easily control printing options and ensure that no text will be cut off the page.

This is an easy solution to a pesky problem, but it’s not yet available to the vast majority who use Internet Explorer. The good news is that the next version of IE (IE7) is currently in beta testing for Windows XP systems, and it will include Shrink to Fit printing as well as many other changes, presumably spurred by the success of Firefox.