Mike Thaxton
Fine Print is a Windows printer driver that saves ink, paper, and time by controlling and enhancing printed output.
Does it do what it promises?
Reviewer 1: Right off the top, I must confess that I was very pleased to have this review come along. I have been using FinePrint for several years, and consider it to be one of my essential programs. Whenever I have to reformat a drive, or set up a new computer, this is one of the first programs that I install. Yes, it does do what it promises. And it keeps on getting better as time goes along.
Reviewer 2: Yes. This program does exactly what it says, and does it well.
Reviewer 3: Yes.
Reviewer 4: Yes.
Reviewer 5: Yes, it does, in a convenient, simple to learn and use package.
Reviewer 6: Yes. This is a neat program that inserts itself between your programs and your printer. It allows you to process and refine your printer output before final printing.
Was it easy to install?
Reviewer 1: Yes, the install is painless. As printing is one of the basic functions of the Operating System, I do not mess around with the default parameters at all, and let the program establish itself where it will feel most comfortable. It installs as a Printer, so it shows up in the Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes, or Control Panel > Printers and Faxes. It can be uninstalled from the Add-Remove Programs, or Deleted in the Printers and Faxes like any other printer. Normally you would go through the Add-Remove Programs, but if that does not work properly, the Website has an explanation of how to completely remove the program in a different fashion.
Reviewer 2: Yes, it installed problem-free and quickly.
Reviewer 3: Yes. I was slightly surprised that Fine Print’s program wanted to start when the system started. This was pointed out to me by CounterSpy which required me to allow the program to be added to the startup.
Reviewer 4: No. While a relatively small (2.38mb) download, the installation process is slow and confusing. There is no installation wizard and after the download there is nothing to indicate that it is installing, let alone what progress it is making. There are no icons, no preferences, no GUI, and while it does place itself in your start folder, it does not appear on the start menu.
FinePrint responded: When the installer completes, it displays a message saying “Installation completed. You may now print to FinePrint from any application.” There is a section in the help file about how to use the product and also a feature tour item at https://fineprint.com/fpsupport-topics/
Reviewer 5: Yes, simple, fast, and painless.
Reviewer 6: Installation was fast and easy on my system.
Good Points
Reviewer 1: Fine Print gives you enormous control over one of the expensive parts of computer use: the Printing. At present, I have two available “real” printers: one InkJet and one LaserJet. I have made FinePrint my default printer so, no matter which application I print from, I go through the FinePrint Dialog box.
Actually at this point, you can select any one of the printers you have installed, and bypass Fine Print. I do not do this very often, but may sometimes want or need to. OK this and arrive at the FinePrint dialog box. This is where FinePrint begins to show its power. You can preview the pages to be printed and decide how you want that particular print job to be done. You can leave the setting at Bypass, which means that it will print as a normal print job.
Or, you can set it to print 2 sheets on the one page – one of my most common choices — or 4 sheets, or 8 sheets (I seldom use this, but it is sometimes useful for a bunch of Web pages). You can choose to have it print double-sided, or on one side only. At some point during this preview process you select (from a drop-down menu) the actual printer you will send this job to. Just these features alone make it worthwhile for me.
From February to the end of April (income tax time), I use the 2-up and double-sided features for well over half my print work. So I am actually saving 75% of the paper I would normally have to use. As well, I can scroll through the pages before actually printing them, and selectively delete any that I do not need or do not want to print. Sometimes I see that I am set up with one line on the last page, so I go back and make the adjustment to either save that page, or readjust whatever I need to, to make the printed output look better.
In many programs, you can do this through the Print Preview process, but with Fine Print, it is always the same, no matter what the application. So I rarely look at the print preview of the various applications I use, as they behave variously. I know the Fine Print process, and it works as well as any application’s Print Previews, and better than most. And I have not yet seen anyone else offer the “1-up,2-up, 4-up, 8-up, booklet” options of Fine Print. You can print in reverse order, you can tell it to collate the copies, tell it how many copies to print, or just simply close it down without printing at all. You can change the margins, change the orientation, create or use watermarks, put in headers and footers, add letterhead, make the job into a form, or use predefined forms.
You can change the paper size, or “shrink-to fit” (e.g. from 8 1/23×14 to 8 陆 x 11), and combine multiple print jobs into one. You can save a print job to disk, or let Fine Print do the saving automatically for recall in the event of a sudden computer shutdown. Fine Print offers good technical support. There is a Help button just about wherever you are in the program, and F1 will work too. Under the About Menu item, there is a link to the Technical Support. In the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) you are instructed how to get help directly from Fine Print itself. Any time I have written to Technical Support, the answers have been prompt and to-the point. And most often, it has come from the founders themselves. It’s good to know that the original designers and creators of the program meet the clients’ needs.
Reviewer 2: This program performs a function so useful and does it so well; it’s hard to believe I had never tried it before now. When printing a large document, it’s so easy to just print to Fine Print and put multiple pages on one sheet of paper. I recently printed a large (60-page) briefing and had Fine Print print out four pages per sheet.
It saved 75% of the paper I would have used printing straight out. It is a great idea implemented very well. It is extremely easy to use. It installs as a printer, so you just select ‘print’ on your document and choose Fine Print as the printer, then choose how many pages to put on each sheet and print. It has a large number of printing options, allowing you to collate pages, use stationery, add borders, and even use both sides of the paper.
Reviewer 3: Fine print has a nice interface that allows a user to make changes to the output before actually printing. I also liked that you could set it to be bypassed very easily if necessary. I have several printers connected to my network, so I can already print duplex as well as multiple pages per side. I didn’t think I would use Fine Print’s capabilities that much, but I found myself using it as a print preview – something that I couldn’t do using the print drivers from the various printers. I also liked the ease with which a watermark can be added to anything I print. Again, my printers have this capability but it is not the easiest thing to use. The ability to delete pages before printing was also very useful.
Reviewer 4: Fine Print is essentially a printing management program that installs a new print driver on your Windows OS. It provides enhanced printing controls, enabling users to easily print multiple document pages onto a single sheet of paper, format print jobs to automatically produce booklet-style documents, embed letterheads, superimpose watermarks, and much more.
Especially attractive is its ability to delete unwanted pages from print jobs such as when printing Web pages. It also supports duplex printing on non-duplex printers through an integrated option. Another nice feature is that you can select your final output printer directly from the preview window.
When used with Fine Print Software’s other product, PDF Factory Pro 2 (see future NNT review), there is a PDF Factory that enables Fine Print Pro to be used as the default print driver when printing created PDF files from PDF Factory Pro 2; thus, every time a print job is submitted, a preview screen and a wide array of options is presented to include creating PDFs without the need to change the driver to a PDF driver. This is actually its best and really only unique feature.
Reviewer 5: Clear, easy-to-understand and use interface for all main-line functions. Anything it said it would do I found intuitive to get done with the program. Some of the special-case set-up/adjustments for oddball printers I found murky, but that’s probably more the quirks of the printers rather a deficiency with Fine Print, which should deserve a pat on the back for trying to accommodate with them. Great guarantee: “If you are dissatisfied with a FinePrint product after your purchase, we will refund your money.” Also a member of the 1%-for-the-Planet cause.) I found the capability to reduce the size of printout so that it would fit on a standard 8.5×11-in sheet of paper a very beneficial feature. For some reason, Web pages always seem to have their Menu on the left hand side of the page which usually causes the right hand content to spill beyond the right hand margin. With Fine Print, it’s easy to compensate and fix that.
Reviewer 6: This program installs itself as a printer driver; when you print from any program you choose, Fine Print appears in the printer list and the program pops up with your output loaded. You can then refine your print output with a variety of useful options including shrinking the page and print 2,4,or 8 smaller pages on a single piece of paper; resizing a large document to fit on a smaller page size (legal to letter for example); printing in booklet form; adding information in the “stationary” section to overlay your document with useful markings such as a time stamp, the words “Urgent, Proof, Confidential, Top Secret, Draft, Final, etc.”; inserting a custom header, footer, or watermark on all or selected pages; saving Settings for future print jobs; and. choosing which printer to direct your output to. You preview the print output and can delete selected pages from the print job without deleting them from the original document. This addresses one of my pet printer peeves – printing a Web page for content and having the boilerplate at the bottom run over to a separate wasted page.
Weak Points
Reviewer 1: I have found only one application that does not successfully use Fine Print. It is a very old, no-longer supported calendar program that I have had for nearly 10 years. I use it only once a year, and since I do not really need to preview the output, I simply define the LaserJet printer to work as it would have done otherwise. Apart from that, I am able to use Fine Print with the scores of other applications that I have printed from over the years with no trouble at all.
Reviewer 2: If FinePrint has a weak point, I never found it during my testing. It performed flawlessly for me.
Reviewer 3: The only issues I had with the program was that at times some of the options were not available to me and I couldn’t find a good explanation as to why. It also was inconsistent with choosing settings – for example, just viewing the various watermarks sometimes set one as the default, even when I canceled out of viewing them.
Reviewer 4: In addition to the difficulties related to installing this software there was the added confusion caused by the fact that PDF Factory – besides being the name of a separate software program – is the name of the company which developed this software. This became confusing when asking to agree to the license agreement (EULA) when installing Fine Print Pro. There was no mention of this specific program, only PDF Factory, and that left me momentarily thinking I had downloaded the wrong program. I realize that there is not a GUI (Graphic User Interface) often associated with a driver installation; however, there should have been something to tell the user where to find the program, and that the program could be found by opening the printer dialogue box. Furthermore, I do not think it self-explanatory how this program can be used. While there is information on the Web site, there could easily be some type of help file available as a part of the download as well. Additionally, I am always greatly displeased when a program not only lodges itself in my startup folder without my permission, but I am even more annoyed when the only way I can remove the program from automatically starting every time the computer is turned on is by going to the Windows System Configuration applet (Start, Run, msconfig) and remove it manually. I suspect there are many uses out there that do not know how to do this or, at best, are uncomfortable doing this (and rightly so since you can easily do some damage if you do not know what you are doing). Furthermore, even when disabled from starting automatically, Fine Print lodges itself as a running process even when not being used, thus requiring removing it through the Task Manager applet or, for the advanced user only, by disabling the process or resetting it to manual. As a part of any test of software I think it is worth noting how well software can be uninstalled if need be. Fine Print Pro does not cleanly uninstall. In my tests, it left not only a 2.38mb file (and by the way, it is a 2.38 mb download, not 1.8 mb as indicated on the Web site) but also nine empty keys in the Registry. Finally, and I saved what may be the worst for last, there is apparently no technical/customer support – and in this instance it was seriously needed. When I installed the program on both of my machines, my computer immediately and completely froze up. The only way I could unfreeze the computer was by shutting off the power. After rebooting, the problem did not recur. There were no driver conflicts and nothing I could find that might have caused this problem. Note, however, that there is no instruction or indication that a reboot is needed after installation. As this occurred on two separate machines and different platforms, and did so after an uninstall and reinstallation on both machines, I can only assume that this is a problem with the software and not my equipment. Nevertheless, three emails to customer support went unanswered over a two-week period.
Reviewer 5: The price of $49.95 is at least double what I believe justified for the functionality provided. I’d say $19.95 or less appropriate. Tech Support is available only via EMail, and no Turnaround time is specified nor committed; however, I had no occasion to use technical support, to their credit. While Fine Print is admittedly more a post-processor than a full-fledged program, I expect to have a User Manual included, not just Help Files which can only be browsed online or printed one page at a time.
Reviewer 6: I did not find any major weak points in this program. The following are some refinements I would like to see in future versions: I would like to see more visual cues on the Preview Page to find other pages to preview in a multi-page document. This is done presently by clicking on the scroll bar on the right of the page. For me, this was not an intuitive act. I first searched for buttons/boxes I have seen in other programs indicating that you are seeing “page 1 of 5” allowing you to change the page displayed by clicking on an arrow or to enter a page number directly in the box. Personally, I find this latter interface intuitive and easy and would suggest adding it in addition to the scroll bar. The print preview page came up in a small window on my computer screen. Consider taking advantage of the whole screen by displaying the preview in maximized mode. It would be nice to have a section specifying which page(s) to print. The current approach of deleting an unwanted print page is not intuitive – I found it only by reading the help section. Also, if I wanted to print one page out of a 200-page document, it would be easier to select the page I wanted to print rather than deleting the 199 I didn’t want. Finally, I needed to search a bit to find instructions on how to use the features on this preview page. There is a Help button but it’s in the middle of other buttons at the bottom of the page. There’s also a useful troubleshooting FAQ but it’s buried in the “About” tab at the top of the page (I don’t think about going here for help unless I want to go to the company Web page or to check the version number). How about adding a tab at the top specifically titled as “Instructions”? Also, making the “Help” button stand out with bolder type or a graphic would be an improvement.
Other Comments
Reviewer 1: When I first came across Fine Print, I was a bit worried about the price. It seemed at that time to be quite high, and I hesitated for quite a few weeks before taking the plunge. I have never regretted that decision. Apart from feeling that I am making an effort to help to reduce unnecessary waste of paper, I am sure that I have recovered my original investment, not only in paper, but also many times over in the cost of cartridges, particularly the Ink Jet ones. And the older Fine Print 2000 is still available for download – the version I was using until a few weeks ago.
Reviewer 2: This has become one of my favorite programs. I do a fair amount of research and writing, and the ability to save paper with such control is a welcome addition to my PC.
Reviewer 3. As I mentioned before, Fine Print wanted to be part of my startup and that may be a problem for some people. I also didn’t get a chance to use the templates that are part of the package. I can certainly see how this application could help save paper.
Reviewer 4: I have a general rule regarding customer support: when there is none or it is too untimely to be of any value, I do not purchase the software. This is something a potential buyer should always evaluate as a part of any trial period being offered. This alone prevents me from recommending this program without regard to the problems it caused my computer. However, for those of you who are courageous souls, be aware that FinePrint Pro really offers you very little if anything not already a part of most printers made in the past few years, and at $49.95 you might want to check your own printer’s capabilities carefully before making a reasonably expensive software purchase.
Reviewer 5: On its About page, Fine Print has a scoreboard that lists Savings, which may or may not be a useful metric, but nowhere did I find it defined. Though thin on function, this program has a very well-designed intuitive user interface, and it performed flawlessly and usefully for me.
Reviewer 6: This is a simple, easy, and useful program. It improves the functions of all programs having a printed output.
Will you continue to use it?
Reviewer 1: Without question, yes. Top recommendation.
Reviewer 2: Yes.
Reviewer 3: Yes. Overall a very useful program.
Reviewer 4: No.
Reviewer 5: Yes.
Reviewer 6: Yes.
