Printing from the Web
By Micheline Johnson 		

Source your document 
Most web documents these days are in HTML or PDF format. If you print an HTML document from your browser, it prints the source URL at the top or bottom, but usually truncates it, and annoyingly repeats the URL as a footnote on every page. If you print a PDF document from a browser, it usually does not print the source URL. More and more articles these days are published on the web in PDF format. It is important to have the source URL on the first page of your printout, so that later you can find out where the article came from. 
Extracting the article from the Ads 
Many commercial sites are more in the business of publishing advertisements, with multi-part articles (a few paragraphs per part) buried amongst all the ads. A few more considerate sites offer a print friendly version, with all the parts included on one page, without the ads. The standard way to print articles from such sites without a print-friendly version, was to select (highlight) the article part of each web page, and print the selected part. You still end up with typically 5-10 pages (parts) of print. The font size on the web page is usually chosen to suit the viewer, and not the print output, resulting in a print font usually far too large. If there are tables on the web page with defined widths, which there usually where there are ads in adjacent columns, then often the text column width exceeds the width of your printed page. 
Printing PDF web pages 
PDF files have the advantage that they contain no advertisements, and they are formatted and have font sizes, to suit the printed page. They usually print beautifully, but have no source URL on the printout. Unfortunately, you cannot edit a PDF document (yet) to insert the source URL before printing it. I used to add the source URL by hand at the top of the first page. Lately, I have discovered how easy it is to paste this URL into a WordPad document, adjust the WordPad Page-Setup top margin to suit the space available at the top of the PDF first page printout, and print this WordPad document onto the top of the first printed page of the PDF. 
HTML pages with long URLs 
The same technique can be used for simple single page HTML pages that have URLs so long that they get truncated when printed by most browsers, IE included. Print the page with your browser, but also copy the page address (URL) into WordPad, adjust the font size so that the URL fits onto one line (or if it is exceptionally long, onto two lines), and print this WordPad document onto the top of the already printed HTML page. 
Printing HTML web pages 
Printing an article from a commercial web page is much harder. In order to conserve the amount of printed paper, I have long since taken to transferring the article from the web page to a word-processor, removing the fixed width tables, adjusting the font size to get more words per page, combining all the parts into a single part, and adding the source URL at the top of the article, before printing it out. 
The copy and paste feature in Windows is amazingly powerful. If you select the text and images of interest from the web page, then ^C will copy not just the text, but all the underlying HTML, including the tables and pictures. This is often more than you really want. When you paste (^V), a small icon at the end of the paste is very useful. It allows the paste to be formatted as in the original web document (font size etc), or as in the destination document. The latter takes care of your preferred font size, but it removes all the paragraph spacing. Rather than re-insert the para spacing, I usually find it faster to paste as per the source document, and then modify the font size of the whole document. This retains the original para formatting. 
Copy and paste from a web page does not actually copy from the page stored in your computer, but instead downloads a new copy from the source site. This can be slow. A faster method is often to use Paste Special, and select one of the options offered, such as 

•	Unformatted text 
•	

•	Formatted text (RTF) 		
•	Unformatted Unicode text 		
etc. This copies directly from your computer. 
Copy and paste works well from HTML to MS Word, after all Internet Explorer and Word were designed to work together. Corel WordPerfect does not work as well. Corel are aware that they have a problem with pasting tables and images. 
Removing the text from the hidden tables can be tricky, especially when it is not obvious that tables are present. The first clue is that your text does not flow to the edge of the page. The second clue is that when you place the mouse over the text-in-a-table, a “move” square (square with 4 arrows) appears at the top left hand corner of the table, and a tiny (expand/contract) square appears at the bottom right hand corner of the table. 
The first thing to do is to right-click either of these squares, select borders and shading, and select a border type that you can see. Now you can remove the superfluous columns and rows, and copy the text and images you want to a part of your document outside the table, before deleting the entire table. 

Postscript
Extracting articles, or parts of articles, from HTML web pages, including automatic attribution (source address), is now made a lot easier with Google Notebook, see http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/overview.html.