Modify or setup Firefox printing

Firefox offers quite a bit of control over how you print your Web pages, including printing headers and footers, what to put in those headers and footers, page margins and a good deal more. To customize printing, choose File-->Page Setup. Click the Margins & Header/Footer tab, and you'll see a screen like that shown nearby.

Most of this is pretty self-explanatory. The top part of the screen lets you set the margins along the top, bottom and sides of the page. The bottom part lets you choose whether to print headers and footers, and choose to print text such as the URL of the page, the date and the time, and so on. Just make your selection from the drop-down list.

You're not stuck with just what's on the drop-down list, either. You can customize your printing as well. Select Custom from any of the drop-down lists, and a Custom text box appears. Whatever text you type in that box will appear when you print. The power of this becomes apparent when you combine this with special codes that use variables. Following are the list of variables you can put into the text box and what they'll do:

Printing shortcuts
Variable	What it prints
&PT	Page number and total number of pages (for example: "1 of 4")
&P	Page number
&D	Date
&U	URL
&T	Page title

You can combine these codes with text. So, for example, if you visited a Web page on Dec. 15, 2008, the Web page was five printed pages long and you typed in this code:

Preston printed &P on &D

this is what you'd see on page 3 of the printout:

Preston printed 3 of 5 on 12/15/2008

Posted in: Firefox Tricks