Do you find it difficult to concentrate on an article in an online magazine when it’s embedded in a web page that screams at you to click on dozens of advertising buttons, tries to focus your attention on little ‘info-boxes’, and tempts you with side-bars containing navigation links to other (maybe more) fascinating information? And when you want to print a page or article to diminish the temptation to click on, how do you do so without having to include all that ‘noise’? Here are a couple of services that help.

Joliprint allows you to print .pdf pages of articles on websites without any sidebars and/or advertising included.  Simply enter the URL of the article or blog post you want to print and it opens it as a .pdf in a new tab. The resulting formatting is elegant and accurate. You can also drag a bookmarklet onto your menu bar in Firefox to allow easy access and install the service onto a WordPress blog – which I’ve done on the pages of clivemcgoun.net enabling students to easily print off course material.

It’s a similar principle to that adopted by another service called Readability which I use to get rid of the distractions on web pages such as the Guardian, the BBC, Wired, Slate etc. I can’t sustain long screen reading but with Readability I find I can concentrate and enjoy the experience for longer.  Printing is a possibility with Readability but it’s not very good. It doesn’t, for example, format into multiple columns and its fonts are pretty big for printing multiple pages.

My advice: read with Readability and print with Joliprint.