PRINTER FREAKING FRIENDLY!!! This means that when you click that "Print This" or "Printer Friendly" link, you get a version of the story with VERY few graphics (usually just the media outlet logo and MAYBE the photo that accompanies the story, if there is one), no sidebars (the tables with extra links and information) and absolutely no advertisements. The whole point is not just to give you something that will fit on a piece of 8.5x11 paper but to give you something that actually simplifies what is on the page. It is one thing for a business site to include the printer friendly tag and leave images on an information page. Often times, visitors will want the photos - for example, photos of a travel destination embedded with the text relating to it. But, for a paper, everyone knows you want the freaking text and you most certainly do not want to print out advertisements. All of the big media outlets have figured this out - CNN, Fox, NY Times, etc. But, it seems the programmers at the Chron need a hand because their so-called printer friendly versions of stories come complete with sidebars and advertisements. ARGHHH!
PRINT? If it is on the web, why do you need to print it? Read it at work. I do. No wonder I am so productive. Anway, there has to be a service out there that just gives you the text without pictures, banners, animations, etc. If I find it , I will edit this message... BRB... (WTF is this, a CHAT?)
or just copy and paste the text into a Word document. Not pretty, but gives you the information you need.
The main reason I use printer friendly is to cut and paste articles to email or to the BBS (i.e. the Calvin Murphy trial story this morning). Problem is, when you cut and paste with the ads or sidebars, you have to edit out the "ADVERTIESMENT" and all the sidebar crap that comes with it.
I'm reminded of that scene in a Seinfeld when Elaine says she's not going to shake up her drinks anymore, then Jerry shakes it and says, "yeah, this is real tough".
I think it is a pet peeve for me because Clutch and I are asked to do that all the time for clients and never seem to have a problem with it.
I wrote a small script that emailed myself a cleaned up version of the top 25 articles from the Washington Post's site. If you have access to Perl or any language that features regular expressions it could remove extraneous text for you. Definitely not an ideal solution, but very do-able.
