Saving Money While Using Pay For Print

Rule 1: ALWAYS use Netscape's "Print Preview" to check web pages before you print them.

Fig. 1: Location of the Print Preview command in Netscape

The Print Preview command in Netscape allows you to see what a Web document will look like as printed pages before you actually ask for it to be printed. The command is located under the FILE menu on the Netscape Menu Bar.

Fig. 2: The Print Preview Screen in Netscape

TIP: Print Preview also lets you know if there is any problem with some aspect of your document. If a picture, piece of text or entire section of your web document is missing from Print Preview, you should not attempt to print the page until those items appear.

Print Preview allows you to review the entire document, forward and backward. You can zoom in or zoom out to pinpoint specific sections or pictures. With Print Preview you find out how big your web document really is -- a single web page can sometimes equal 10 or more printed pages. You can locate interesting portions of the document, note which page they appear on, and print only that page -- saving yourself the cost of printing the entire thing.

Once you have previewed your document, keep in mind which pages you want to print. When you ask for the document to print, you will be presented with the box you see at left. It is here that you can request only a page or range of pages, not the whole thing, be sent to the printer.

Rule 2: Avoid printing web pages which feature animation or motion

Web pages featuring animation, motion, streaming video or anything other than pictures and text are difficult to print. Many times the printout contains not the picture you hoped for but a stream of garbage characters which cover the page.

When you go to the Print Station to pay for your print job, keep an eye out for print jobs which seem unusually large. If you previewed the page at the workstation and it appeared to only fill three printed pages but the Print Station tells you it will be 11 pages once you have highlighted it on the screen, something is wrong. You should cancel the request at this point. It is likely that the Web page featured some form of animation.