How to avoid printing nearly blank pages?

Question

How many times have you printed an email just to have the last page be 2 or 3 lines of a person's signature (or worse, the "This is confidential" copy inserted by corporate mailservers)? How many times has the last page contained just the footer of the website?

Does anyone know of a utility or print driver that can help avoid printing blank or nearly-blank pages? I am not looking for techniques for avoiding this in specific programs -- if I take the effort of doing print preview and then adjusting the pages to be printed, then of course I can avoid it.

What I want something I can install that, whenever I push "Print" to any of the various printers I print to with my laptop, it automatically says "hmmm... I bet he doesn't really want that page which is 95% empty" and possibly prompts me to say "do you really want to waste paper on this?"

Answer 1

Well, that's why Print Preview is there. Before actually printing you usually can select which pages of your document (or email, for that matter) you want to print. As you say, there's always useless info that doesn't need to be printed, so you can deselect the last page/s to avoid printing something unnecessary.

Answer 2

To my knowledge, there is no such driver or other software. Given that the number of variations that people may not want to print is infinite, I don't think it would be practical to write such a piece of software.

As you already alluded to and @javipas already answered, Print Preview seems the way to go ... except when it doesn't match up to what really prints (like browsers sometimes do).

Answer 3

I found this in another thread. There are clearly several options available - Enjoy!

Check out Print Friendly and the Printliminator, I've come to prefer the Printliminator. Don't know if they do 2-page/sheet, dual-sided. But as they both work with the browser the normal print options should be able to handle it.

I usually send the output of the Printliminator to CutePDF to save a copy then print it when i actually want to read it.

Firefox FireShot addon.

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages (entirely or just visible part).

Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.

The captures can be:
- uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting
- saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP)
- printed
- copied to clipboard
- e-mailed
- sent to configurable external editor for further processing.

Answer 4

There are several eco green printing options that you can use in Print&Share:

Method 1 is using automatic page selection:

1. create a new profile
2. go to the channel configuration
3. click "Page selection"
4. condition select: "coverage requirement"
5. configure as you want (e.g. remove pages with too much white space).

Another option is to manually deselect pages in a profile:

There are options to remove automatically blank spaces and reduce the amount of paper being used:

remove empty spaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQLKWSLVuk

You can also remove email signatures (or other content) automatically, by defining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMPCZ7uggYk

now in case you want to decide each time which option that should be used, you can also create several channels and put them in toggle: e.g.:

1. Normal print
2. Removed blank pages
3. removed pages with little content + blank pages etc...

How to enable toggle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWtidsxpzZY

and there are even more options to configure I guess: http://www.printandshare.info/overview/eco