The Importance Of Being Printer Friendly

On printing this website’s pages to PDF… or dead tree paper.    #print-to-pdf #print-to-dead-tree-paper

I believe in primarily using the internet to enrich the outernet. I.e. leveraging digital tools and the distributive power of the internet to delight and connect people IRL.
—Danielle, raw and feral substack

Readers with even moderate skill using computers and the internet will easily recognise that for reading lengthy texts, the PDF format is far more suitable than having the same text displayed on the viewport of a web browser. Moreover, even for short(er) texts, you may still wish to keep an offline copy, for a variety of reasons: to read at a later time, perhaps from a location without internet access, to keep a local copy, lest the original is taken offline (or should you neglect to bookmark it, only to subsequently fail to find it again), etc.

Now, there are those so-called “offline browsers”, that allow you to create a mirror of a given website on your local computer. And while they can be very useful, on some circumstances, they may not always be the most adequate solution: for one thing, even for a single page, it will have to store several files, and furthermore, you will still have to read it from the browser—which, as mentioned above, can be somewhat of a pain with lengthier texts.

So what is the solution? I know of no general solution, but for the website of yours truly here, I propose using your browser’s capability to print the page to PDF.¹ The pages on this website are designed in a way that will increase the odds of obtaining a “proper” PDF file—i.e. a PDF file that accurately mimics the original webpage. Now in my browser of choice—Firefox—there is one thing its printing to PDF engine is missing, which is the capacity to preserve internal links. Which is a shame, to be sure, but one that lends itself to a rather simple workaround: use chromium!²

And you can even go one step further: as anyone who reads a lot quickly recognises, while reading PDFs on the screen is much better than doing it in the browser, both options still pale in comparison to reading things printed on (dead tree) paper.³ Which is actually what the quote above is about: you use the internet to get information, and then print it onto the much reading-friendly medium of good old fashioned paper. Of course it also works the other way round: you write something and put it in PDF form, and both send it via the internet, and print it to paper to share and/or distribute, as you see fit. In both scenarios—getting and sending information—you enrich the «outernet», i.e. the brick-and-mortar world, which is what the acronym IRL—in real life—actually refers to.⁴

April 27, 2026.