Most of us had faced the problem to print websites from Google Chrome browser. Chrome doesn’t have any print preview function-which shows how the webpage looks when it taken as a print out. As the chrome lacked a print preview option most of the users faced many difficulties to print directly from Google chrome, most of them used the ‘blind’ printout ! I have also tried it once and experienced that it may print the waste pages contains menus and advertisements in the print out page and the arrangements/layout of the page was appears to be horrible. So at that time I personally used Firefox or Internet explorer for this purpose. I loved the print preview interface of Firefox, as it provides what will get if we click the print button. It helped me to avoid printing waste pages. But I am not fully happy with the layout of the print preview page. Internet explorer also have a nice print preview option.
Here is a great solution from Google for those who want to take printout from the web. When I updated my Google chrome browser yesterday, I noticed a good print preview feature in it. The print preview of a Mashable article is shown above, you can able to see how Google optimized it for printing. You need the Chrome 13 beta version to use the facility. From the Chrome 13 browser onwards you can easily preview the document and hit the print button more confidence. Chrome’s implementation is special because it uses the built-in PDF plugin to convert the page you want to print into a PDF file. There’s no special “print preview” option: when you click “print”, Chrome opens a new tab that shows some of the options from the native print dialog and a preview pane.
Chrome generates a PDF file every time you click “print” and when you change printing settings and you can save the file by selecting “Print to PDF” from the “Destination” drop-down. Unfortunately, Chrome’s PDF files are huge (the file generated for Google’s homepage has almost 1 MB). Google managed to reduce the performance penalty of generating PDF files and now print preview is pretty fast, on par with Internet Explorer 9. To open the native printing dialog, click “Advanced”. You’ll be able to change printer settings, add a new printer or print selected text. If you disable the built-in PDF plugin, Chrome will show an error message instead of the preview and you’ll only be able to print a page using the native dialog. That’s an important flaw that needs to be addressed before releasing the stable version.Chrome’s tabbed printing page doesn’t integrate with Google Cloud Print yet, but this feature will be available in the future.
One of the best thing that I noticed in Google Chrome print preview is its layout, pretty clear without much advertisements or banners. I noticed that in blogs it eliminated the clutter and just showed only the content, the pictures appears in gray scale which is also good for printing.Google plans to add many other missing features: ability to adjust headers, footers and margins, shrink/expand to fit page, integration with Google Docs, a search box for printers, location-aware printer selection, syncing print preview settings to the native dialog.
What you think about this new print preview feature? Are you satisfied with the layout and print preview arrangements? Do you have any suggestions to improve it ?
