As the years passed, we became increasingly alarmed at the sheer resilience of that apparently flimsy medium. The evidence was right there in the monthly stationery bill. Yes, we had all those high-res screens, all those “bits” of binary code that Nicholas Negroponte at MIT’s Media Lab assured us, way back in 1995, were infinitely superior to “atoms” [you may recall that atoms used to be an elementary component of what we once called “matter”, before everything went virtual]. But we were using just as much paper as we ever had … if not more.

In fact, the more people communicated electronically, the more paper they consumed. They might have been surfing the Web electronically, but they were whipping up waves of paper. And although email did become a killer application, it didn’t assassinate any of the paper companies.

Researchers suggest that email alone increased demand for paper by 40 per cent. And however “hyper” text may have become out there on the Web, when it got on to somebody’s desktop, it was only a matter of time before somebody pushed the print button.
As a matter of fact, we blame the print button for the resurgence of paper. If you want to understand why the paper industry puts growth in paper sales at between 4 and 10 per cent per year, look no farther than that little icon up there on the tool bar, or under the File menu.

The print button exercises a fatal attraction on the psyche of the average computer user. It’s so tempting to just push it, whatever the consequences for the paper tray. Yes, you could choose the Print Preview option. If you did that, you might spot the fact that practically every Web page you want to print out has been ingeniously designed to produce a second page with just a few, useless lines. You could then change the page range to print just one page. You could even alter the margins, or change the header and footer.

You could cut your paper expenses by perhaps a third or more, if you took the time to futz around with Print Preview, but for most of us, it’s all too tedious. It’s easier to push that button, and to hell with the stationery bill.

Enter FinePrint 5.41. Download the software ($US49.95 for a generous single licence that allows you to install it on your laptop and desktop PCs, provided you don’t use them simultaneously), and you will forever be protected from the profligacy of the Print button.

It captures all your print jobs, presenting you with a much more powerful print preview function that you can easily edit to add or delete pages, and print two pages – or even four or eight - on one sheet of paper, or as a duplex job using both sides of paper, even if your printer isn’t a duplex model.

Better still, if you’ve got a lot of pages to print, you can produce them as a booklet. Imagine a sheaf of A4 pages, printed on both sides in landscape. Fold it in the middle, and you’ve got a professional looking publication. If you’re doing some Web research, for instance, you can tell FinePrint to defer printing each job until you’ve collected all the material, then print it all off as a booklet in a single run.

Take, for example, the PDF newsletter that Bleeding Edge receives every month. Until we installed FinePrint, that newsletter chewed up something like 32 sheets of A4 paper, which reduces Bleeding Edge’s pitiful budget by roughly 42c. Now it takes just eight pages, and we have almost 30c in the kitty that we can put towards the cost of a short black, with a dash of cream. Our coffee fund has improved somewhat these days now that we’re using 70gsm draft paper, which is fine for most everyday printing. You can apply some of those savings to the occasional packet of 100gsm white, when you really want to impress somebody.

FinePrint allows you to do things like convert coloured text to black, skip graphics, apply watermarks, create electronic forms and letterheads, shrink larger pages to fit on a smaller sheet, and adjust margins and gutters. By default it automatically saves your last five print jobs, and you can choose to save each one, which could save a lot of time if somebody wants another copy.

FinePrint also includes a paper-saving meter, which indicates the percentage of your paper bill that can now be applied to coffee. Over a few years of use, we’ve cut our paper costs for multi-page documents by 75 per cent. Bleeding Edge has started thinking again about shorting those paper stocks.

Upgrades in the same release number (version 5.3 to 5.4 for instance) are free. It costs $US14.95 to move up from an earlier version number.