How to Save Cash, Ink and Paper when Printing

If you’re shocked by the costs your printer incurs then this information is for you. Learn how to reduce printing costs by making some simple and free tweaks to your printing routine and print settings.
Printing costs, especially if you have an inkjet printer, are astronomical.

You do have the option to save an article or document as a file, email it to yourself, and read it on your computer, tablet or smartphone screen.  But if you must print, think about adjusting your printer's output settings:

1. To reduce the size of the print job, use the File menu or Print menu from which the program you're printing.  Use the print preview button to make sure you’re not printing blank pages at the end of the web site you’re about to print off. If you’re not using the print preview you’re just asking to end up with all sorts of extra pages out of the printer. When you preview you can see if the document will look the way you want on the page and you can also see if the last page will, for example, be nothing but the web site footer and an advertisement.
2. Start shrinking your print size. Can you shrink to fit the page and still read it?   Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, and most major document reading and editing applications support shrink to fit and scaling the page before printing.
3. Switch to draft mode as the default setting. Depending on your printer the actual title will vary. Some companies call it “draft mode” others call it “toner saver”, “print saver”, “economy” and so on. Regardless of the name it’s a setting or series of settings that allow you to reduce how much ink and toner you're using. For simple things like articles and basic documents you’ll likely not even notice the difference. If you do notice it won’t likely decrease your ease of reading. What it will do is radically cut down on how much ink and toner you're using on the paper.
4. Print only the selected text.  Before you print, use your mouse pointer to highlight the area on the screen you wish to print.  Then bring up your print window (usually File, Print in most programs) and choose the option to print the selection.  Selective printing is an aggressive approach where you edit prints before they are sent to your printer saving yourself a bundle in the process. A variety of solutions exist to help you conserve ink and toner by selectively printing.
5. When printing from the web, PrintWhatYouLike.com is a great resource for on-the-fly web site editing. By either plugging in the URL to their web site or launching their bookmarklet—you can quickly and easily edit a site and pull out the content you don’t want. Want the article, a few of the how-to photos you might need to reference, and that’s it? Go ahead and click on (and delete or resize) all the elements you don’t need. You can adjust the font size, selectively edit, and otherwise reduce the footprint of the document. (source: www.howtogeek.com)

Happy Clicking,
Betsy
The PC Teacher
www.thepcteacher.com