Actions and Pro Features

What your readers are offered once PrintFriendly opens, and the four settings a Pro license unlocks.

The Four Actions

Each can be switched off in the builder. Off means the control is not shown in the preview at all.

Print opens the reader's own print dialog with the cleaned-up page.
PDF turns the article into a PDF and downloads it. On Pro the content is sent from your reader's browser, so this works even on pages we could never reach ourselves; on the free button we fetch the page instead, and anything behind a login will fail. See free and Pro.
Email sends a short excerpt of the article with a link back to it, to an address your reader types in. It does not send the whole page, and it does not send the PDF.
Click to delete lets the reader remove paragraphs and images before printing. It changes only their copy and never touches your site.

Switching an action off does not change the button

The two are separate. If you turn Email off, pick a button arrangement without the Email icon as well, or readers will click something that does nothing. Arrangements are on the button page.

What Pro Adds

Pro is licensed per domain. The full comparison is on the overview; the short version is:

The preview opens on your own site rather than sending your reader to printfriendly.com. This is the difference most publishers buy it for.
It works behind a login or a paywall, because the article is read in your reader's browser instead of fetched by us.
No ads beside the preview, and no PrintFriendly credit on the printed page.
Three subdomains and a free staging domain.
Encode images sends images from your reader's browser instead of us fetching them from your server.
Show hidden content keeps material the page hides with CSS or script, such as closed tabs and accordions.

Common Questions

When should I turn on Encode images?#

When images show in the PrintFriendly preview but go missing in the downloaded PDF. That gap is the signature of the problem it solves.

Encode images is a Pro setting, and on Pro the article text already travels from your reader's browser, so the words are never in question. The images are the exception: by default we fetch those from your server while building the PDF, as an anonymous visitor would. If your host blocks unfamiliar visitors, sits behind a firewall, or serves images only to logged-in users, that request comes back empty and the image is missing.

With this on, the images travel with the page from the reader's browser, and we never ask your server for anything. It makes the request a little larger and a little slower, which is why it is not on by default.

When should I turn on Show hidden content?#

When your articles keep real text inside tabs, accordions or anything else collapsed by default, and readers complain that the printout only has the first section.

Leave it off otherwise. It is a blunt instrument: it keeps everything the page was hiding, which on many sites includes navigation menus, cookie banners and feedback forms. Turn it on, print two or three of your own pages, and check you like the result before leaving it on.

I bought Pro but still see ads or the PrintFriendly credit#

Pro attaches to a domain, so the usual cause is a mismatch between the domain you licensed and the one you are testing. A license for example.com does not cover a staging host, a preview URL, or a different subdomain unless your plan includes them.

Check the domain on your account against the address bar, character for character. If they match and it still shows ads, send us the URL.

Can I use different settings on different pages?#

Yes. The settings come from the tag on the page, so a page carrying a different settings tag behaves differently. Useful when one section of a site needs images left out and the rest does not.