Print Multiple Tabs or Bookmarks As One PDF Document In Firefox

The majority of web page to pdf extensions let you convert a single web page into a pdf document. This may often be all that’s needed, but it is not very practicable if you want to create a pdf document from multiple web pages. While you could now do some copying and pasting into Microsoft Office or Open Office, and use the programs to create the pdf document for you in the end, you’d probably be interested in a more straightforward option.

The Firefox add-on Print pages to Pdf could be a solution, provided that you are running Firefox on Windows or Linux. Linux support has just been added by the developer in the latest add-on version, and it currently is limited to 32-bit versions only. It is likely that this is going to change in the near future.

The extension has a whooping file size of more than 8 Megabytes under Windows, which is something that you should take into considerations, especially on computer’s that do not have a lot of RAM installed.

Once you have installed the extension and restarted the Firefox browser, you will notice that a new entry has been added to the right-click context menu in the browser.

 

Here you can select to print the active tabs, or all open tabs, to pdf. You also get the option to print the pages as they come, or only text. Keep in mind that all tabs of the active window will be printed to pdf in this case, and not all tabs in all windows. One option for researchers would be to bookmark all relevant pages into a single bookmark folder to print the whole folder in the end to a single pdf document. I’d suggest you open a new window before you start your research if you plan to print the open tabs to pdf using the extension.

 

You can also print bookmarks, for instance in the bookmarks’ folder to pdf. Just right-click a folder or selected bookmarks again and select one of the options displayed to you in the context menu.

Before you start converting websites or bookmarks to pdf, you may want to take a look at the extension options. Here you can make a lot of changes. The general tab allows you to change the output directory and menu appearance in the browser. If you have no intention of converting bookmarks to pdf, you can disable the context menu option here. The pdf document is automatically opened once it has been created, which you can block here as well.

The pdf global and webpage tabs can be used to change the output. The global tab displays options to change the output format to postscript from PDF, configure the output paperformat, units and margins, outlines, and to include a table of contents on the first page of the pdf. The table of contents is pretty interesting, as sub headings are for instance added to the contents as well automatically.

 

The webpage tab handles styling, header and footer layout preferences for all selected pages and bookmarks. From adding custom text or a header file over including or excluding external and local links, to the exclusion of backgrounds and graphics. It is all there and needs to be configured once for all printing activities. The default settings are working well, but customizing them provides you with more flexibility and cleaner looking print outs.

This extension works really well with several print-related add-ons, like Edit Page.

Print Multiple Document Types at once
Organize Firefox Bookmarks In Tabs
Print Images On Multiple Pages With Image Print Wizard
Span Firefox Tabs Across Multiple Rows
Open Multiple Bookmarks in Firefox at once

What Do You Actually Print Nowadays? [Ask The Readers]

Printing is becoming more and more unnecessary as we use our mobile devices to carry information with us. You no longer have to print tickets to movies or flights, you can save your shopping list in an app, and much more. With fewer reasons to print nowadays, what exceptions do you make? Photos? Important documents? Receipts? We'd like to know.

Personally, I hardly print anything anymore. I used to print photos because I liked having hard copies, but they always ended up in a box never to return. My phone handles tickets, I sign documents digitally so I don't need to print them, and the only time I ever really print something is if it's a package label or it's going up on my wall. I love printed things, but they've just become so unnecessary in my life that I can't justify it anymore. What do you still print and why? Do you wish you didn't have to print anything or do you prefer keeping paper around?

Use Google Analytics to Track When People Print your Web Pages

This guide describes how you can track when users print web pages on your site. You can use your existing Google Analytics profile to track print usage.

Say you have a website that is printer-friendly but you are not too sure if people are actually printing your web pages. And if they are, you are interested to know how often they print pages and what is the kind of content that users are most likely to print on your site.

 

There are basically three ways to print any standard web page (see above screenshot):

Experienced users may press the Ctrl + P keyboard shortcut (or Command-P on a Mac) to send the current web page to the printer.Some web pages have a dedicated PRINT button on the page itself.Other users may prefer to print web pages from the File Menu that is standard across all browsers.

Because there are multiple ways to print the same web page, it is difficult to use JavaScript based event tracking in Google Analytics to track print usage.

A simple workaround is that you add an invisible tracking image (like the ones used for read receipts in email) only in the printed version of a web page. Thus when a user prints a web page, through any route, that tracking image will download on his / her computer and you can easily track the print (and print preview) action.

That was the boring theory but you can safely skip the technical details and get right into implementing the actual tracking code.

All you have to do is copy-paste the following code above the closing tag in your website template. If you are on WordPress, you can simple paste it in your footer.php file.

Please remember to replace REPLACE_ME in the code with your actual Google Analytics Profile ID which looks something like this – UA-12345-89.

Once the tracking code is live, wait for a day or two as as Google Analytics may take time to process usage data. Then log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Content –> Site Content –> Pages and set /print/ as the search filter.

You’ll get a complete list of web pages that have been printed in this duration while the Pageview column will reflect the the number of times a particular page has been printed . Set the Secondary Dimension in the report as Browser or Operating System or Country and you’ll get additional details about the users who are using the Print function on your web site.

Here’s a sample print usage report generated with Google Analytics.

 

Should you be interested in the technical details, here they are. The JavaScript code adds the following CSS rule to your HTML webpage while it is rendering in the browser.

This is simple print only rule that will add an invisible tracking image to the printer-friendly version of your page (body:after). When a user prints the page, the tracking image downloads on the user’s computer and this is registered as a page view in Google Analytics as shown in the above report.

The above CSS rule is only activated when the users invokes the print or print preview command. Some PDF writing programs also use the Print stylesheet when saving web pages to PDFs and thus, the same tracking code will work in those cases as well.

PS: If you have a PHP enabled web server, you can simple copy this PHP file on to your own server as index.php and  replace ctrlq.org/urchin in the above JavaScript code with your own web server’s address.