Miss Sandy @ Quill Cottage asked me a question on my other blog and I thought it best to share some ideas here:

I have a question, do you know how to print out a post from your own blog? I have searched to no avail. I know there are places you can pay to have your blog printed in book form but I just want find out if there is a way to print out certain posts from my own blog on my own printer. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Miss Sandy is talking about Blurb as the place you can pay to have your whole blog printed in book form (you can edit it so it’s not printing all of your blog). Blurb has software you download to your computer and allows you to make different kinds of books. It will pull the posts (and I’m assuming pictures too) from your blog and puts it into book format. Then you can edit, style and arrange as much as you want. When you’re finished with your masterpiece, you can either order just 1 book for your keepsakes or 20 for family and friends. This is a great idea especially for all those Blogging Mommies out there! Right now however, this is only compatible with Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal.com and WordPress.com blogs.

Check out a sample at Blurb and look at the other books you could create.

But Miss Sandy wants to know about printing out a few posts here or there on her own printer. This can get a little tricky. Let’s say you wanted to print out this post. The first thing you’d do is go to the page where it’s only showing this post vs the front page where it has a bunch of other posts. If you click on the title of this post, you will go to a page displaying only this post and any comments.

Once you are at that page, you can go to File - Print Preview to see the way the page would print from your browser. It’s probably pretty ugly. You might see the header graphic on one page, part of the copy on page 2, and the comment form on the last page. If you’re printing this just for your archives, then it may not matter how this looks. But if you wanted to put it in a scrapbook or a notebook for people to view later on down the road, you might want it to look better.

The easiest thing I can tell you to do is to copy and paste the post into Microsoft Word or better yet, use OpenOffice (which is the free, open source version of Microsoft Office). Here you can lay it out like you want it to be when it’s printed. If you are only printing a few posts out, then this might not be so bad — otherwise, copying and pasting will become a tedious job.

Another option is to setup a print CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) for your blog. Honestly at this point, I do not know if you can use a separate print CSS file with Blogger. I’ll have to do some research. Essentially what you do in the print CSS file is to tell certain things not to display — like the sidebar, the header graphic, etc. You can set the font and font size to be different for printing than displaying on the screen.

There are some other ways to work around this, but unless you are a techie/coding freak like me, you’re probably better off copying and pasting into a word processor. Let me know if you have other questions about any of this. I am planning on doing some CSS tutorials here as well, and creating a print style sheet can be one of them