Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Better Knitty Printing

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The first step to starting a great pattern from knitty.com is, of course, printing it out. Unless you're going to knit it straight from the screen, of course. Newer knitty patterns have the "Print only the essentials" button, which removes most of the "alternate view" pictures from the pattern to save paper space and ink. Older ones, like the one I wanted to print, don't have that feature. Besides the increased paper/ink consumption, those additional photos can sometimes cause layout problems on the printed page...text can bleed on top of a photo, or even be obscured by it.

Michael happened to be walking by as I was about to print, and I said, "Ugh, I wish there was a way to print without graphics. Wait, that wouldn't work because I still need the charts. I really just want to remove the photos."

His response? "Oh, that's easy." So I thought I'd share what he told me.

This only works with the Google Chrome browser (so you'll have to download it if you don't have it, but it's so much faster, I'll bet you'll keep using it). And it may not remove all extraneous spaces, but it'll probably do a better job than just printing willy-nilly.

Step 1: Right-click on top of a picture you want to remove. Pick the "Inspect element" menu option.
This will open up a separate window titled "Developer Tools". Don't panic.

Step 2: There's a little HTML here, but don't worry. If you mess this step up, you can always "reload" the page and start over. The "img" tag (short for "image") corresponding to the picture you right-clicked over should be highlighted. You can see in the background that the picture is highlighted, too...that's how you know you're in the right spot. If you accidentally click somewhere else in that window and it's no longer highlighted, just close it and repeat step 1. Otherwise, right-click on top of that highlighted "img" tag and pick "Delete node".
(For advanced users, i.e., those that know some HTML, in this particular case, you might want to remove that entire table row ("tr" tag), or "div" tag if it's around the picture...that's what I did, thinking it would readjust spacing better.)

Voila! The picture has disappeared. Repeat steps 1 & 2 for any other pictures you want to remove. When you're done, close the Developer Tools window, print the page, and the pictures won't be there! Remember if you mess up, just "reload" the page (although you'll have to start over with removing pictures). There's a chance, due to the layout of the page, that there will still be a "space" as if the picture was still there. If you know some HTML, you can probably figure out which node to remove to fix it. If you don't...well, you're going to have to use that extra paper. =)

Hope this helps someone out! (I'd love a comment if it helped you. =)

Don't forget my Fall knitting giveaway! And hey...there's a needlework one, too.

JiffNotes
Print from knitty.com without alll the pictures!

4 comments:

pinkundine said...

Awesome, thanks! I usually copy and paste everything into word and manually remove anything I don't want, but this looks much quicker :)

Richard Rose said...

My usual way of doing this sort of thing is to highlight the pattern, copy and paste it into a word processing program, most will handle pictures as well as text, then delete any unwanted pictures and reformat the text before printing. If the pictures you want don't copy across you can always save the to you hard drive then paste them in from there.

Melanie said...

Verrrrrrrry interesting. I don't use Chrome every day but I have it installed for the occasional handy-dandy things it can do, like this. :)

Anonymous said...

I have firefox and it looks like it would work with it (and without chrome).
~Ann

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