Must have Firefox extensions: Part 5

Previously in this series we looked at the brilliant MyStickies extension. This afternoon I'll be discussing an extremely useful extension for users who print a lot of content off webpages.

Aardvark

If you've ever printed content off the web you realize that much of the time it's cluttered with things you could care less about such as advertisements (graphical or otherwise). You also might be frusterated with content that is squeezed out of place due to menubars.

The creators of Aardvark have felt your pain and developed an extension that allows you to temporarily remove elements of a webpage allowing you to format it however you like for printing (or even just viewing). Once the extension is installed you can run it by right-clicking anywhere on a webpage and selecting "Start Aardvark." You'll notice a small menu will display with keyboard shortcuts to begin using Aardvark to edit content.

<R> Remove, <I> Isolate, <E> Erase, <B> Black on white, <D> De-widthify, <C> Colorize, <V> View Source, <P> Paste, <W> Wider, <N> Narrower, <U> Undo, <Q> Quit, <H> Help

It's helpful when first starting out with Aardvark to remember that pressing <H> will bring back the menu displaying all the keys and their related function.

As you move your mouse around with Aardvark initialized you'll notice a box with a red border around it appearing over elements of the webpage. When you have an element highlighted with a box, press the <E> key and the element will be erased from the webpage. You should now be getting an idea of the power this extension grants you! If you ever make a mistake during your modifications, you can UNDO one level back by pressing <U>, or just quit Aardvark (<Q>) and reload the page. None of your changes are permanent.

If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat this extension is particularly powerful by editing a webpage how you want it, then printing it to Adobe Distiller to output it as a PDF file. I did this recently and the results were fantastic!

You can download Aardvark from karmatics.com.