CleverPrint for Windows

Abelssoft's CleverPrint helps save you time and money on your print jobs by eliminating unnecessary pages and printing multiple pages on one page. It can also eliminate graphics to further reduce toner use and speed up print jobs. CleverPrint can combine print jobs from business tools like Outlook and Acrobat into single print jobs, too. It even saves and manages letterheads that you can add to your printed documents. CleverPrint is ready for Windows 8. It's shareware that you can use for free for 30 days, though some of the full version's features are disabled in the free trial.

CleverPrint installs itself as a printer driver as well as a program. It has an Office-style user interface (and a nag screen) with a ribbon-style toolbar and start button accessing basic features. The main interface is for setting up your print preferences such as borders, letterhead, and multiple page-on-page options; we could also save our settings to quickly process regular jobs. Something unique: The program calculates "green" savings in water, wood, CO2, and energy when you reduce the number of pages printed per job. The easiest way to use CleverPrint is simply to print on a document. We clicked Print on a Word document. CleverPrint had set itself as our default printer. If it doesn't show up as your default printer, try clicking the printer menu on the Print Properties sheet. Of course, you need to be able to read documents containing multiple pages, but CleverPrint's preview window let us view our print jobs as well as our border settings and so on. Your printer's capabilities will figure in printing quality, obviously. Our black-and-white desktop laser printer produced excellent results with CleverPrint's driver.

CleverPrint isn't difficult to use, but it is quite a bit more complicated than the average printer driver (a PDF-based Handbook explains every step). It's also obvious that businesses and others who do a lot of printing will get the most benefit from its capabilities, though its unique way of calculating and displaying how it helps you reduce energy and use fewer resources might help persuade users of its value.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of CleverPrint 2013.