Printing Wide Web Pages

We all know the problem of printing web pages and I have come up with a simple solution that automatically reduces the size of the page and prints it as a bitmap. It prints well.

You may or may not know that I’m an inveterate programmer and there has been some discussion about turning web pages into a bitmap on one of the Visual Basic lists. Anyway to cut a long story short, I embedded IE into a Visual Basic program and using some of Microsoft’s knowledge base, was able to cut out the web page as a bitmap. None of IE remains and I can even cut out the scroll bars.

Thinking about this technique it leads to several other ideas.

1. Automatic scaling and printing of web pages. Just size the browser and say Print.

2. Saving of web page images. Ideal for copyright abuse, pornography, advert logging for web sites. Just save the web page as a bitmap.

3. Saving of web page images with notes. Better still for lawyers and copyright abuse etc.

You could even write programs around this technology, to do specialised applications.

I’ll put up a link when I finish the program. At present it is part of my Multiple Browser, but I suspect it might end up as something in its own right.