Printing Selected Text

By Christopher Breen (mac911@macworld.com)

Mac 911 Tip of the Week

Reader Michael Laurence would like more flexibility in his printing. He writes: "Is there some way to select specific text for printing rather than an entire article? When I used Mac OS 9 I used a program called Net-Print for this but it is not available for OS X. I realize one can take a screen snapshot of selected text and then print it but this is a rather cumbersome way to do things."

MacEase's Steve Becker offers a variety of solutions that expand the Mac's printing capabilities. The one I'd suggest to you is the $15 iPrint for OS X. It's a straightforward utility that runs in the background. Once installed, just select some text, press Control-Option-P, and the selected text in the active window prints. You'll lose some formatting along the way, but it gets the job done.

Though both MacEase's Web site and the application icon look like they were designed in the late '90s, iPrint works with the latest version of Leopard. If you're a do-it-yourselfer, you could create an AppleScript that copies the selected text, pastes it into a TextEdit document, and then prints that document.