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19/08/2004 |
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Fineprint 2000 Want to save the planet? Kai Chandler goes green over Fineprint.
Do you ever find yourself printing reams of paper but thinking that if only you could print more than one page ‘per page’ then you’d save paper, ink and even the planet?
When you click on print, FinePrint’s setup screen appears. At its simplest, you can just select a layout, for example two pages of output reduced to one page of paper, preview the end result and print. FinePrint calls that configuration 2-up. It also supports 4-up and 8-up but to be legible when shrunk, the original text should be created with a fairly large font size.
The watermark feature lets you overprint your text with ‘draft’, ‘confidential’, or other word of your choice. You can create forms and letterheads in a word processor and store them in FinePrint to apply automatically when printing. A decent word processor such as Word already provides these options but FinePrint is equally at home when printing from other less, sophisticated applications. You can also print booklets from FinePrint – it prompts you to reinsert paper the other way up to print doublesided. A neat wizard helps you configure the program for your printer to ensure the pages are printed correctly. FinePrint also scales large documents so they fit onto standard paper sizes such as A4. This gets over the perennial problem of printing web pages that otherwise wouldn’t fit properly on a page. If you ever want to print multiple documents then FinePrint’s deferred printing option will let you combine them together as a single print job. Deferred documents can be saved and retrieved for later editing. This saves wasting space printing lots of header information and saves your energy walking over the printer each time.
The good news is that as FinePrint 2000 is shareware you can try before you buy. The only limitation is that until registered, any printed pages carry a small acknowledgement in the footer. Download from here for Windows 95/98/ME users or for NT/XP/2000 users. Go on, save the planet! |
FinePrint
2000 is a simple program that does just that. It installs as a print
driver so instead of printing, say, to your inkjet printer,
FinePrint appears as a print destination. 
FinePrint
is extremely flexible and you can set dozens of other
characteristics. For example there are options for headers and
footers so you can mark documents with the date, time, security
status, user name, printer name and other system variables. 
In tests, FinePrint 2000 performed brilliantly under
Windows 98 but I experienced occasional lockups under Windows XP so
remember to save your work before hitting that print button.