Over time, readers have asked about the best way to print our blog posts and recipes. We had a “printer friendly” function that was somewhat limited. So, we drank some good wine and discussed how to improve it. The result is a set of redesigned print options to give you some better choices. These special print options don’t apply to the home page, but they do apply to every article and recipe post and to all wine dog and SpotLight posts as well.

When you go to the permalink for any post (that is, the page that shows the full post—not just the opening paragraph on the home page), you’ll notice a printer icon following the post title. If you just click on that printer icon, a print options box with the two basic choices (shown in the image above) will magically appear—”Print Text Only” or “Print Text & Images”. If you click on the same printer icon again, the print options box will close.

You can try it on this post. Just click on the printer icon that follows the title “Print Options For Our Site” at the top of this post. When the print options box opens up, try the “Print Text Only” option. This should generate a page showing the post in “text only” format beneath our Wine Imbiber banner. You can print this page by using your browser’s print menu function or you can scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Click here to print” link.

On the other hand, you might want to print a post with all of the images shown in the post. For example, you might want to print out a recipe with a picture of what the finished dish is supposed to look like. To do that, just click on the “Print Text & Images” option instead. That should generate a page showing the post exactly as it appears on our web site—green background and all. Now, if you print that page, it will include the images in the post. However, it might not print the green background color or the burgundy wine ring around the post date. That is because the default setting for most browsers is to print without any background colors or images. If you want to print the green background and the wine ring with the post and its pictures, you need to change your browser setting to print background colors and images.

This is pretty easy to do. For Internet Explorer 7, for example, you open the “Tools” menu on your browser’s toolbar and then select “Internet Options” and then click on the “Advanced” tab. Once there, scroll down to the “Printing” section and check the box that reads “Print background colors and images”. From then on, you’ll print the background items with the post.

If you need any help with these new print options, feel free to contact us. Happy printing!

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