If you are like me who likes to print long web pages and blog entries for offline reading, then you certainly have wondered how could you prevent the printing of the webpage’s URL on every page. It’s so irritating to see the URL at the top/bottom of every page… it’s a waste of precious ink as well!

Today, let me show you how to easily prevent this from happening. Oh this depends on which browser you are using.

Internet Explorer

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Printer icon on the toolbar. Select the Page Setup menu item.

In the Page Setup window, you should see the “Headers and Footers” setting which specifies what are to be printed in the headers and footers. The codes “&u&b&d” will eventually print the URL of the page, as well as the printing date. You can simply delete off the codes such as “&u&b&d” which is in the footer section to have a blank footer.

You can of course modify the codes to print out different stuff in the headers and footers. Here is a list of the codes:

• &w – Window Title
• &u – Page URL
• &d – Date in short format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &D – Date in long format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &t – Time in regular format as shown on the clock (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &T – Time in 24-hour format
• &p – Current page number
• &P – Total number of pages
• &b – right align the next text. (following &b)
• &b&b: Centered text (between &b&b)
• && – A single ampersand (&)

There you are, pretty straight forward and easy for Internet Explorer. Now, how about Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox

On the File menu, click on Page Setup. Then in the popup window select the Margins & Header/Footer tab.

Here you should see that it’s very easy to change the margins, and of course the header and footer options. All the options are in the 6 drop down selection lists, no messy codes to play with as in the IE browser. If you want to get rid of the URL, just select blank in the drop down list.

There you are, some quick tips for Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Don’t ask me how to do this in other browsers such as Opera, because I haven’t played with them that much yet.