The Best Way to Print an Article

Given the wide range of ways webpages are rendered and designed across the internet, it’s much harder than it looks to capture a page as it looks on a computer screen. With text-heavy pages in particular, printing the page can render the formatting of the text and images entirely illegible!

A dysfunctional in-browser printing feature

I recently wanted to print a New Yorker article written in 1964 about an encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr. so I could archive it in my personal library of favorite articles to revisit and reread. But when I went to print the article using the in-browser print function, the marquee photo of the article was laid across the first paragraph (see image above).

And formatting misfires like this happen all the time! Web pages are designed to be viewed in a web browser, not printed to paper or saved as a PDF.

Using GoFullPage

Luckily, I have GoFullPage downloaded as an extension on my browser, so I can take a screenshot of the entire webpage—rendered exactly as I see it on my computer screen.

While viewing my screenshot, I can go ahead and click the “Download PDF” button to generate a printable PDF of the webpage. However, when the extension makes page breaks to print the screenshotted image across multiple pages, I see that lines of text are getting split between different pages of the PDF.

Take for example this excerpt:

Introducing Smart Page Splitting

When Peter and I were seeing this text splitting issue come up with PDFs for text-heavy pages, we knew there had to be a way to create a better solution for our users. So we built a new Smart Page Splitting feature for GoFullPage Premium!

Smart Page Splitting works by checking each page break in the PDF and scanning upwards to see if there’s a cleaner point where it can cut the image. It can run into issues if it encounters a large image spanning the page break, but it’s pretty darn good at what it does:

Give it a whirl!

Go ahead and give this new feature a try with a free 7-day trial of GoFullPage Premium, or if you’re already using Premium then it should be enabled by default.

You can manage PDF Paper size from the Options page: US Letter, US Legal, A4, US Letter Landscape, US Legal Landscape, Full Image (this last one is great for viewing, but generally not so good for printing).

We hope you’ll see a difference on your articles, or other text-heavy pages, with our new Smart Page Splitting feature—happy reading!