The hanging chad problem

After installation, GreenPrint becomes your computer's default printer, acting as a "middleman" with your real printer.

By DAVID SHAMAH
computer 88 (photo credit: )
computer 88
(photo credit: )
Today's beef: printing, and the apparent collusion between Web sites and e-mail programs to make you waste paper and ink. How many times have you printed out an article on your favorite Web site (Jpost.com, of course!) and gotten the dreaded "almost blank page"? This, of course, is the last page of the document with the address of the Web site, or the copyright notice, or some other useless piece of data completely irrelevant to the article in question. Ditto for e-mail messages: There's always a "hanging chad," a little tiny bit of text on that last extra page that has nothing to do with what you need the printout for. It's almost like it's a conspiracy. Clearly, the paper people are in on this. Or maybe it's just sloppy Web or e-mail formatting. Whatever the reason, it costs you money in wasted paper and ink - and costs the environment in extra trees that have to be cut down to make the extra wasted paper. Lest you think that the number of trees that could be saved in this way is negligible, GreenPrint (http://www.printgreener. com), a company with a great solution to this problem, says that if every Fortune 500 company were to use its software printing waste solution, paper companies would need to cut down two million fewer trees a year. So what is GreenPrint's big money and environment saving plan? It's a piece of software you download that acts as a printing "gatekeeper" - automatically eliminating extra pages that serve no purpose, such as the infamous last page - or any other page you feel you don't need. You can easily eliminate images, logos, or any other element you don't need in your printout with a click - and even forgo the whole printing thing by using GreenPrint's built-in PDF creator. After installation, GreenPrint becomes your computer's default printer, acting as a "middleman" with your real printer. Any page not deemed printworthy shows up in red in the GreenPrint preview (you can choose to print it, of you really want to). You can eliminate the images in the preview window, too. And how great is a free program that lets you write PDFs, eliminating the need for Adobe Acrobat and saving you hundreds? At GreenPrint, saving the environment and saving money go hand in hand. Now that's cool! http://www.newzgeek.com