I love cooking, and I enjoy trying out recipes I find across the Web. When I see a recipe I want to make, I print it out and file it in one of my binders. Tragically, many recipe sites – including one of my favourites, Chocolate-Covered Katie (healthy vegan desserts; check it out!) – don’t have a function that lets you print out a recipe without the unneeded images, comments, navigation, header, and other extraneous bits that use up ink and paper.
Until recently, I’d always copy-paste each recipe into a Word document before printing, formatting it in my beloved Gill Sans font, and adjusting margins and font size to get it onto one page. This took up a fair amount of time.
My online 
recipe life changed forever when someone pointed out that Print Friendly – makers of a WordPress plugin – also offer a browser bookmarklet that can be used to easily print anything on the web. It lets you do things like automatically remove graphics, shrink the font size, and hide any text you don’t need. Mind = blown.
Print Friendly also makes a WordPress plugin and offers an option for WordPress.com – though if you’re adding recipes to WordPress.com, I’d recommend using the recipe shortcode instead, which comes with a built-in print feature.
Printing out recipes may sound old school, and perhaps someday I’ll go digital. But for now, the Print Friendly bookmarklet is just the ticket, and has made my online recipe adventures even more pleasurable.
Kathryn Presner 
7 replies on “Friendly Printing”
Those vegan desserts look wonderful. Thanks!
I hope you find some dishes you like there! One of my faves is the Healthy Butterfingers, which I make with peanut-hazelnut butter instead of all-peanut: http://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2012/10/18/healthy-butterfingers/
Cute and handy little applet – thanks for the tiplet!!
As someone who has a recipe site, I can attest that implementing one of the plugins or shortcodes for printing recipes takes a bit of work (especially to reformat old posts) so it can be hard to make the switch.
Any reason why you aren’t plopping these into a Google Doc? I have most of my (shared / clipped / bookmarked) recipes in a Gdoc so I can index them and print them if I need to 🙂
For sure, I can imagine! Short-term pain for long-term gain (for your readers) though… But sounds tedious for sure. I wonder if any of it could be automated somehow with a script running on an export file.
You know, I started copy-pasting into Word so long before Google Docs existed I’ve just kept doing it that way, but it’s an interesting idea!
What I’d really like to do is find a better way to organize my recipe printouts – I have three big binders of recipes in different categories that are really hard to navigate. I end up reprinting recipes because I can’t find them in my binders – not very efficient or environmentally friendly. :-\
Are they organized by type (entree / appetizer, etc.) or just by chronologic order (i.e., when you printed them)? If the latter, think about having a binder dedicated to each main area (appetizers, soups, entrees, pasta, desserts, etc.) 🙂
That’s how they are organized now more or less, except that I already have an entire binder for desserts organized into sections for cakes/brownies-bars/cookies, etc. I think I need to get even more granular, I’m trying to cook more veggies now, for example, and am starting to divide my vegetable section into salads & slaws, cooked veggies, etc.