How to print only the part of a page you selected

By Nasir Uddin Shamim · Founder, PrintxPDF

Updated 2026-07-19 · 4 min read

Short answer: Highlight the text you want, press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on Mac), and choose "Selection only" under the pages option in the print dialog. Chrome, Firefox and Edge all support this. Safari uses "Print Selected Text" from the File menu after you select.

Printing a selection is the fastest way to get one paragraph, one table or one recipe onto paper without touching anything else on the page. Every desktop browser supports it, but each one hides the setting somewhere different.

Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers

Select the content Click and drag across the text you want. Include the heading if you want it on the printout.
Open the print dialog Press Ctrl+P on Windows or Cmd+P on macOS. Do not right-click and choose Print, which prints the whole page in some builds.
Find the Pages dropdown Under Pages, open the dropdown that says "All" and choose Selection only.
Check the preview The preview should now show just your selection. If it still shows everything, your selection was lost when the dialog opened, close it, reselect, and try again.
Print Choose your printer, or "Save as PDF" as the destination, and confirm.

Firefox

Firefox puts the same option under Print → More settings → Print → Selection. Firefox also remembers the choice for the next print job in the same session, which is handy if you are printing several selections in a row.

Safari on macOS

Safari does not offer a selection radio button in the print sheet. Instead, select the text, then use File → Print Selected Text. If that menu item is greyed out, click once inside the page body first so Safari knows which frame the selection belongs to.

When selection printing does not work

A few situations break it:

The content sits inside an iframe, such as an embedded document viewer or a comment widget. Browsers treat that as a separate page. Open the iframe in its own tab first (right-click → "This Frame" → "Open Frame in New Tab" in Firefox).
The page uses CSS that disables selection (user-select: none). Reader mode or a printer-friendly view sidesteps it.
The selection spans a table that gets clipped. Printers cut wide tables at the page edge. Switch to landscape orientation, or reduce the scale to 70 percent.
The site is a single-page app that re-renders when the dialog opens, wiping the selection.

Tip: For any of the above, paste the URL into the web page printer, delete everything except the block you want, and print that. It takes about ten seconds and works regardless of how the site is built.

Already have the content in an HTML file? Convert it straight to PDF.

Printing a selection to PDF

The same trick works for PDFs: choose Save as PDF as your printer destination instead of a physical printer. You get a one-page PDF containing only the selection, which is ideal for filing receipts or quoting a source in a report. See saving a web page as a PDF for the full walkthrough.

Frequently asked questions

Why is "Selection only" missing from my print dialog?

The option only appears when the browser detects an active text selection at the moment the dialog opens. If you selected text and then clicked elsewhere, the selection was cleared. Reselect and press Ctrl+P without clicking anything in between.

Can I print a selection on a phone?

Mobile browsers do not offer selection printing. Instead, copy the text, paste it into a notes app or into a printer-friendly tool paste box, and print from there.

Does printing a selection keep the formatting?

Mostly. Headings, bold text, links and lists survive. Complex multi-column layouts and floated images often reflow, which is usually an improvement on paper.

How do I print two separate paragraphs from different parts of a page?

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) while dragging to build a multi-part selection in Firefox. Chrome does not support discontinuous selections, so paste the URL into a cleaner and delete the paragraphs you do not want instead.