Who it is for

Turn a web page into a handout in one click

A page printed straight from the browser brings its menus, its consent bar and its adverts onto the handout. Clipping brings the text, with the source URL kept inside the file so attribution takes no extra work.

What the browser actually prints

You find the right explanation, press print, and the preview shows three pages: navigation on the first, the text you wanted on the second, a footer of links on the third, and an advert somewhere in the middle. Print stylesheets are the first thing a site stops maintaining, and the ones that survive are tuned to the site’s idea of a printed page rather than yours.

Copying into a document is not much better. The formatting arrives and fights your template, images come in at the wrong size, and the source URL, the one thing students actually need, is lost in the paste. Four readings a week turns that into an hour of layout work you never planned to do.

The following September the link is dead. Teaching is built on reuse: the same explanation, the same exercise, adapted for a different group, and a lesson plan made of links quietly stops working over the summer, page by page, with no warning that it has. Material behind a school subscription is worse again – it opens for you on the staff network and not for a pupil at home. A .md file in the folder for that topic opens next year, on any machine, with nothing installed.

What you hand out instead

• A print button that prints the clip, not the page around it.
• The reading view shows the result as ordinary text, without Markdown symbols, before you print or save.
• Select one exercise or one definition and clip only that.
• The source URL stays in the note, so the handout can credit where the material came from.
• Images can be dropped globally or for one site, when they would only eat toner.
• The saved file is plain .md text – any student opens it in any editor, with nothing installed.
• Numbered steps keep their nesting, so a procedure stays a procedure rather than becoming a run of paragraphs.
• Nothing is uploaded and no account is created. The question a school’s data-protection policy asks first has a short answer.

---
title: "The water cycle"
source: "https://science.nasa.gov/earth/water-cycle/"
extraction: "dom"
---

## Where the water goes

Water moves between the ocean, the atmosphere and the land in a continuous
cycle driven by energy from the Sun.

1. Evaporation lifts water from the surface into the air.
2. Condensation forms clouds as that air cools.
3. Precipitation returns the water to the surface.

Setting it up for handouts

Ten minutes at the start of a term. The settings that matter are the ones that decide what comes out of the printer and what the folder looks like next September.

1. Make a folder for your teaching material with a subfolder per topic, Teaching/photosynthesis, before the first clip. A folder that exists gets filled; a folder that has to be created at the moment of clipping does not.
2. Open Options from the extension icon and point the destination there. Leave the icon click as the preview window – for handouts the window is the workspace, because the print button lives in it.
3. Set the filename template to {date}-{title}. That records the year you captured the material, which is how you tell this year’s version of a page from the one you used with last year’s group.
4. Set images to skip if the material is going on paper. A page of photographs turns into a page of grey rectangles and a great deal of toner, and the text is what the class is reading.
5. To take one exercise rather than the whole page, select it first and then click the icon. The window opens on the selection, and the switch at the top confirms which of the two you are looking at.
6. Check the result in the reading view, which shows the clip as ordinary text with no Markdown symbols. That is roughly what the printed page will look like.
7. Print from the window when you want paper and nothing on disk, or save the file when the material is worth having next year. Both come from the same clip.

Settings for classroom material

Two of these differ from what a reader would choose – images off, and the preview window kept rather than bypassed. Both are about what happens on paper.

Photosynthesis

Plants convert light energy into chemical energy stored in sugars. The
reaction takes carbon dioxide and water and releases oxygen.

The overall equation

  6 CO2 + 6 H2O + light -> C6H12O6 + 6 O2

Two stages

  1. Light-dependent reactions, in the thylakoid membrane
  2. The Calvin cycle, in the stroma

Source: science.nasa.gov

Three lessons

One explanation, on paper, in two minutes

You find an explanation of the water cycle that is pitched right for the group. You clip it, check the reading view, and press print. The printed sheet is the text, the numbered stages and the source line: no navigation, no consent bar, no advert, no third page of footer links.

Printing the page directly would have produced three sheets, two of which are the site. The difference is not aesthetic – it is the number of pages the class is handed and the number of times somebody asks what the box at the top is for.

A topic folder that survives the summer

Everything for a unit is clipped into one folder as you build it: the explanation, two exercises, a glossary page. In September the folder opens exactly as it did in June, while two of the four original links now redirect to a rebranded homepage.

Because the filename carries the capture date, it is also obvious which materials came from the previous version of a site. Re-clipping one of them creates a second file rather than replacing the first, so the version you already taught from is not lost while you decide.

A worksheet built from three selections

A single page carries eight exercises and you want three. You select the first, clip it, select the second, clip that, and so on. Three short files, each with the source, which you assemble in whatever your school uses for worksheets.

Selection clipping is the part that makes this quick – the switch at the top of the clip window shows whether you are looking at the selection or the whole page, so there is no guessing about what you just saved.

Against the usual ways to make a handout

Most departments do all of these. The costs below are the ones that show up in the photocopier queue and in September.

When the handout is not right

The print still has the site’s menus on it

That is the browser printing the page rather than the clip. The print button inside the clip window prints the cleaned text; the browser’s own print command, and Ctrl+P on the page behind, print the page as the site laid it out. If the window is open and the text in it looks right, print from the window.

The diagrams did not come across

Images are links to the original site rather than files, so they print only if the machine is online and the site still serves them – and not at all when images are set to “skip”. For material whose content is the diagram, keep the original page open alongside, or save the picture separately – the extension downloads no binary assets of any kind.

The material is behind our subscription and pupils cannot open it

The clip works – the extension reads the page your browser rendered after your login – but that does not change what the licence permits. Whether a class may be given a copy is a question for your institution’s agreement with the publisher, and the answer is the same as it would be for a photocopy.

The interactive activity clipped as nothing

Simulations, embedded quizzes and video players are not text: they are widgets, usually in a separate embedded document, and there is no article body to extract. The extension will report “no article” rather than returning the surrounding page furniture. Clip the accompanying explanation instead, and keep the activity as a link.

What it does not do

It does not lay out a worksheet: no boxes, no answer lines, no branding. You get clean text. It does not download images, so a page whose content is pictures of diagrams gives you links rather than files. It does not check copyright for you; what you may reproduce for a class is a question for your institution’s rules. And it clips one page at a time.

Questions