4. Tweak your way to better printing with IE

IE 7 gives you a great deal of control over how your Web pages print, including whether to print a header or footer, what to put in the header and footer, whether to print thumbnails of Web pages and more.

Changing printing options is simple. Click the down arrow next to the printer icon at the top of IE and choose Print Preview. A screen like the one shown below appears.

The Print Preview screen.

Icons across the top of the page control how the page will print. They're straightforward and self-explanatory, and include options such as printing in landscape or portrait mode, shrinking the printout so it fits nicely on the sheet of paper, and controlling whether headers and footers appear on the printout.

For example, to turn headers and footers on and off, click the fifth icon from the left, or press Alt-E. The preview display will change to reflect whether the headers and footers will print. Click the printer icon on the page when you've got the page set up however you want.

If you'd like, you can tweak what actually appears on the headers and footers when they print. On the Print Preview screen, click the Page Setup icon (it looks like a gear). The Page Setup dialog box, shown below, appears.

Customize headers and footers with the Page Setup dialog box.

The Header and Footer input boxes tell IE what to print in the header and footer. By default, this is what is in the Header box:

&w&bPage &p of &P

This tells IE to print the window title (&w); print the word "Page" and align it and the rest of the text to the right (&bPage); leave a space and print the page number ( &p); and leave another space and print the total number of pages ( &P).

This is what's in the Footer box:

&u&b&d

This tells IE to print the URL (&u), and print the date in short-date format (&b&d).

For example, if you were visiting the New England Patriots home page (www.patriots.com) on Nov. 20, 2007, the window title was "Official Web site of the New England Patriots," and the Web page was two printed pages long, the header would print out like this:

The footer would print out like this:

By changing the text and code in the Header and Footer input boxes on the Page Setup dialog box, you can change what prints out in the header and footer.

You can combine these codes with any text that you enter. So let's say you entered this into the Header box on the Page Setup dialog box:

I visited the &w on &D

If you went to the Patriots' home page on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007, and printed it out, this would be the header:

I visited the Official Web site of the New England Patriots on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007

Let's say you entered this into the Footer box:

I printed Page &p at &T

It would print this:

I printed Page 1 at 17:26:43 PM

(From: computerworld)