Blog du Wren

GreenPrint

A friend of mine works for a company down in Portland with a really great idea which turned into a really great product. The idea is to minimize the amount of printing we do from our computers not by threats, guilt, or peer pressure*, but simply by eliminating all unwanted/unnecessary printing, like those pesky near-empty pages that always seem to show up after printing a web page. As I understand it (I've never actually used the product because I only print about 4 pages per year and I am extremely cautious to make sure there aren't extra pages), this program intercepts the data sent to the printer and then allows you to pick and choose what you want to print. It also has other options like printing to PDF and tracking paper saved.

The company is called GreenPrint and they've just offered up a version of their software for free called GreenPrint World. The two minor downsides are that it is only available for PC (sorry Maccies) and there is a little bit of "tasteful advertising" involved. Anyway, you should check it out. Besides a listing of their products (they also have corporate versions which could really do some change), they have some interesting facts about office paper consumption.

Go forth and print green. After all, millions of trees can't be wrong.

Wednesday January 30 2008

File under: links, environment

Toggle Comments (7)

comment?

on Wed 30th Jan, 2008 01:38 pm PST Saxtor said:
I saw a writeup on this yesterday on Lifehacker. Seems pretty cool, however the addition of yet another dialog box in order to print doesn't seem particularly appealing to me. I do manage to avoid those rogue blank pages, but they do come through every now and then, so I could see it being helpful.
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on Thu 31st Jan, 2008 03:24 am PST Ryan Walters said:
I thought this was going to be cool when I saw it a few days ago... then I installed it. It shrugs off Windows conventions, using dark green buttons (with black text!) and non-standard tabbed dialogs. It has a tray icon for no apparent reason and is constantly in memory. Its feature set is limited. I only run into blank pages when printing from the web, and if you just choose Print Preview in IE you can see if any blank pages are coming and eliminate them from the print range. If you find you really need GreenPrint's capabilities, I'd suggest investing instead in FinePrint which, although not free, has a much larger feature set and has been around for more than a decade.
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on Thu 31st Jan, 2008 03:25 am PST Ryan Walters said:
Here's an alternate way to reduce the amount of printing waste.
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on Fri 01st Feb, 2008 10:53 am PST Joe Wilbur said:
or here's an idea. if you get an extra page printed that's unnecessary, flip it over and stick it back in the printer. i mean even if you're printing a resume on it, you really think they're gonna look at the back? didn't think so. ;-)
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on Fri 01st Feb, 2008 11:16 am PST Caitlin McCool said:
Thanks for the post Wren. GreenPrint World is having a lot of success so far, which is really exciting for us as a start-up! It's understandable that Ryan would want to compare us to FinePrint, but unfortunately that is a fairly specialized product that isn't designed for the average user and doesn't have the environmental tracking ability included in GreenPrint (if you click on the system tray icon you'll be able to see your savings in terms of dollars, pages & greenhouse gasses).If anybody wants to discuss the program with me directly, feel free to drop me a note at caitlin@printgreener.com
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on Fri 01st Feb, 2008 11:21 am PST Joe Wilbur said:
Ryan = served
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on Sun 03rd Feb, 2008 11:29 am PST Sean said:
i usually just cut and paste into a word document and then shrink the font.Less paper used = Less money out of my wallet.
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