How can I print in a different font than the one I see on screen in Firefox?
November 11, 2010 6:29 AM   Subscribe

How can I print in a different font than the one I see on screen in Firefox, easily and with as few clicks as possible?

I'm cheap. I admit it. I just bought a brand new printer after going without one for years, mainly because I didn't want to spend the money on ink.

So I'm looking for a few solutions. I stumbled on ecofont, which claims it can reduce ink usage by 25%. Great! Only problem is, I don't want to switch to that font as my default in Firefox. I want to see either Times New Roman (my default) or whatever font is called for in the website I'm viewing (as specified by the designer), but if I choose to print that website, I'd like to use ecofont.

Of course I know I could do this by going into Firefox options, changing my default to ecofont and unchecking "allow pages to use their own font", refreshing the page, printing, and then changing back to my original settings, but that seems like a lot of work just to print a recipe or whatever.

My first thought was a greasemonkey script or a user style that I could toggle on and off, but I have no skills in that area and there doesn't seem to be one that already exists.

So script kiddies, greasemonkey experts, css whizzes, can you help me? Is there an easy way to achieve this?
posted by katyggls to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Install stylish.

Create a new style. Remove all the contents of the style window (the @moz namespace bit)

Paste in:
@media print {
  body {
    font-family: "ecofont vera sans" !important;
  }
}
Done.
posted by beerbajay at 7:42 AM on November 11, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh, right. The above css doesn't ensure that every element have ecofont, it just sets it as the default font for the body, so the site's own stylesheet can overrride it in some cases. If the results aren't good enough with that, you can use '*' instead of 'body'.
posted by beerbajay at 7:45 AM on November 11, 2010


Almost every printer I've ever own has a ink or toner saver mode, either in the driver or on the front panel. Better to try that than futz about with something that, frankly, has my bogometer jammed up against the stops.
posted by scruss at 8:32 AM on November 11, 2010


Response by poster: beerbajay: "Install stylish.

Create a new style. Remove all the contents of the style window (the @moz namespace bit)

Paste in:
@media print {
  body {
    font-family: "ecofont vera sans" !important;
  }
}
Done
"

That works perfectly thank you! I tried it out on a couple of sites I often print from, and it seems to work on everything. :D You are my hero this morning.
posted by katyggls at 8:45 AM on November 11, 2010


Response by poster: scruss: "Almost every printer I've ever own has a ink or toner saver mode, either in the driver or on the front panel. Better to try that than futz about with something that, frankly, has my bogometer jammed up against the stops"

Um yeah I'm aware of those options. I just wanted to save even more ink. No offense, but I find it funny that you think I should not trust a font created by a third party to save ink, but that I should trust a company that sells printer ink to save me ink on printing. :P
posted by katyggls at 8:48 AM on November 11, 2010


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