Tired of unnecessary white space when printing from the Internet? AI is here to solve that, and it’s about time
There is one tweet by John Moynes that’s been going around X.com for a while now and I can easily relate to it. It goes like this: “Rage Against the Machine never specified what type of machine they were raging about, but I think it was probably a printer.”
Printing everything at home remains one of the most frustrating experiences of modern life. Assuming you can actually connect your PC to your printer, who knows what you’ll get on the other end because it rarely looks anything like the document you see on the screen.
Spreadsheets mysteriously split themselves into different pages, and anything printed from a web page comes with a mandatory page or two of extra blank space at the end, perhaps with a line or two of random text at the bottom. Why printer companies haven’t managed to solve this yet is beyond me.
AI to the rescue
Well, maybe it’s beyond humans, because HP has brought in artificial intelligence to solve the problem. Announced at the recent Imagine AI event, HP Print AI is here to solve the common problems associated with printing documents.
Its standout feature, Perfect Output, which is now available in beta for select users, is designed to make what you see on the screen the same as what your printer actually prints. The first problem it needs to solve is to finally make printing from the Internet work.
HP estimates that half of all home printing jobs come from web pages, so it’s crazy to think it took this long to fix this. Perfect Output intelligently reformats and reorganizes the content of a web page to fit the printed page. It also detects unwanted content, such as advertisements or web texts, and removes them.
In fact, it actually makes the pages look beautiful. Check out the before and after screenshots:
Perfect Output also tackles the thorny problem of printing spreadsheets. These have traditionally been difficult to print because they are usually formatted in landscape format. Perfect Output does the hard work of making them fit on a page for you, and even intelligently integrates diagrams into the printouts.
HP also uses AI to help you set up your printer, but honestly, we just want nicer prints that don’t waste piles of paper, when all we wanted was a recipe for spaghetti bolognese. If AI can do that, it’s winning.
While Perfect Output is now available in beta for select customers, HP says it will launch HP Print AI capabilities through 2025.