[Raphmedia]

I've heard of people printing whole articles and reading them in paper format before.

Personally, I would rather have a print.css that hides everything but a message that says "save the trees, don't print an article only to discard it after".

We do have some clients that ask for their website to be printable, but it's mostly clients that are in the legal or medical business. It doesn't come in regular contracts, the client has to ask for it.

[vixin]

Depends what happens to the paper thereafter of course . Somehow, printing out articles from the web seems pretty small beer compared to felling trees in the forests of North Carolina for conversion to wood chips and transporting them 3,000 miles to Drax Power Station in the UK. Not a one-off! There is a purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in Virginia.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290444/Madness-How-...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/21/drax-scraps-...

[pessimism]

Funny you bring up the aspect of saving the trees, because I followed up the post with a suggestion for how Google can reduce the waste by taking more control of the print experience in Chrome: http://www.modrenman.com/2013/05/01/save-the-rainforest-goog....

More than anything else, I just wanted to bring attention to something I think many people don’t know about, because I think it’s mostly a case of people not minding printed web pages rather than them not caring.

[alok-g]

See my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609711

I would find this message rather rude. I am interested in saving trees, but do not think technology offers me a solution yet. I print out of necessity.

[Raphmedia]

Of course, this was a joke more than anything. Printing the web is fine when it is needed.

I'm talking people going to a news website, printing the article, reading it and discarding the resulting paper afterward. Unless you need to annotate or use the printed articles in some of the ways you listed, you shouldn't be printing all the articles you see.

[alok-g]

That matches my understanding too.

It still makes me suffer a lot though because optimizing for printing us clearly not the norm.

Also, I frequently cache articles by printing to PDFs not knowing a better way of capturing a static snapshot of a web page into a single file. I do not print these, but the resulting PDFs suffer from the same layout issues. Also, links do not get converted. (Several PDF software makers supply plugins for Microsoft Office, but almost none for web browsers.) I am happy to hear if someone has a better solution for this (other than using Internet archiving for such cashing).