Everyone has his or her list of printer annoyances. Toward the top of my list are truncated printouts from Internet Explorer. Not only do I waste paper, but I then have to re-adjust the printer margins or orientation to try to get the whole page. If you cant wait for IE 7.0 to fix this problem, you should consider this free and easy solution.

One of Internet Explorers weaknesses is it often clips the right side of the screen so you don't get a complete page. Some people are smart and always use Print Preview first. I tend to omit that step since I can always count on some eagle-eyed intern at the copy machine to spot this flaw.

To give you an example of this problem, the first screen snap represents a section of a web page from the Internet Storm Center. The red box outlines the portion that Internet Explorer will truncate when printing. The second screen snap confirms this omission using Internet Explorers Print Preview function. As you can see, the good folks in Australia are no longer down under, but down and out along with a many other places.

This problem has bothered us for a while until we spotted in the IE Blog from MSDN a control from Adrian Bateman. Rather than adjusting page margins, we use the modified IE print toolbar button. The control also allows us to preview the page by pressing the Control key with this button. No interns required.

To install this fitted-width control,

1. Open Internet Explorer

2. Go to Adrians download page at www.visiontech.ltd.uk/software/index.html

3. Scroll down to Internet Explorer Fitted-Width Printing section.

4. Read the description and the click the link for this download page.

5. You may need to approve the Active X control based on your security settings.

6. Close Internet Explorer

7. Reopen Internet Explorer.

If you don't see the new print toolbar button in Internet Explorer,

1. From the View menu, select Toolbars.

2. Select Customize The Customize Toolbar dialog will open.

3. In the Available toolbar buttons section highlight the printer button with the W.

4. Click the Add --> button.

5. Click the Close button.

For those of you who may be a little reluctant to install an unknown Active-X control, I have two comments. Kudos for questioning unknown Active-X controls. Secondly, you'll be glad to know that Adrian is working for Microsoft to fix this issue in IE 7.0.

• URL: www.visiontech.ltd.uk/software/index.html