Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Natao arisiva ity resaka mitohy ity. Mametraha fanontaniana azafady raha mila fanampiana.

Can't print a "selection"

more options

I recently switched to Firefox from Internet Explorer. Since then, I'm not able to print a selection from a webpage or an email, etc. I followed all of the steps in the tutorial "Fix printing problems in Firefox" but it did not help. I also tried the suggestion to use cntrl-P, but that did not work either. On the print preview window, the selection is grayed out.

What do I need to do to fix this?

Thanks

I recently switched to Firefox from Internet Explorer. Since then, I'm not able to print a selection from a webpage or an email, etc. I followed all of the steps in the tutorial "Fix printing problems in Firefox" but it did not help. I also tried the suggestion to use cntrl-P, but that did not work either. On the print preview window, the selection is grayed out. What do I need to do to fix this? Thanks

All Replies (2)

more options

I you want to print a "selection" use { Ctrl + P } to initiate printing rather than using the Print toolbar button. The "selection" gets lost when going thru Print Preview.

more options

You do have to use Ctrl+p, but there definitely are some glitches with this feature. Depending on the layout of the page, Firefox may print the selection off the right side of the page, or after one or more blank pages, or shrink it too much.

Over the years, several workarounds have been proposed to make printing a selection work more like IE -- IE simply places the selection in the upper left corner of the printout instead of preserving its position on the page.

Here are a couple add-ons that allow you to isolate the text you want to print in a way that works around the problem:

(1) Print Edit - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/print-edit/

With this extension, you call up Print Preview and then make your selection there before printing.

(2) Nuke Anything enhanced - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/nuke-anything-enhanced/

With this extension, you select in the page normally, right-click, and choose Remove Everything Else. Then you can print normally (i.e., don't choose Selection in the Print dialog). Screen shots in this old post: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/923294?page=2#answer-328405

To view the whole page again, you might be able to right-click Undo remove, or you need to reload the page.

(3) Other... I haven't searched for new solutions in the past year, so there may well be some new ideas out there.