Long before the green movement came along, I utilized green practices when sending documents (or document excerpts) to the printer.  For technical documents, like White Papers, I’d always skip the cover page when printing.  After all, I knew the title of the document and I didn’t need any logos or branding to take up an entire print page.  I’d also skip printing the table of contents and any trailing pages that were either blank or just had a few sentences on it.

Traditionally, I’d use the “Print Preview” function that’s available in MSWord and many other applications.  Or, I’d scroll around in Acrobat Reader and figure out which pages to exclude (when printing).  Now, there’s something even neater.  It’s called Green Print and a neat demo can be found here:

http://www.printgreener.com/tutorial.html

Basically, “GreenPrint” becomes your print device (in Windows) and provides you with a “print preview” function (called GreenPrint Preview) that’s got some neat features.  First, it identifies potential “waste areas” for you and highlights them in red.

You can remove selected pages from the print job or remove all text or images from a page.  If you’d like to be truly green and not send the modified document to the printer at all, GreenPrint allows you to save the document as a PDF file.

Another neat thing is the GreenPrint Report, which tabulates the number of pages saved, along with the associated cost savings.  So, use of this latest discovery means that you’re not just being green, you’re saving green too.