How To Print Guides

This page details how you can print off a copy of a guide on TweakGuides for easy offline reference:

-> Just send each page to your printer.

As soon as you send a page to your printer from the browser, it will automatically reformat to print as a full page of text without any of the additional style or ad elements. Of course this requires that you go to each page of the guide to print it, however this is the most practical solution I can implement due to a range of considerations as detailed further below.

Guide Updates: Please keep in mind that all my guides are constantly being updated/maintained to contain the latest and most accurate information. Changes are regularly made throughout my guides, ranging from fixing simple typos through to adjusting the descriptions of tweaks or settings and adding new tweaks as feedback from users is received and new patches come out. Even if you've printed a full version of the guide, make sure to check back regularly for updates to guides.

Downloadable Versions

Users have requested downloadable versions of the guides (e.g. in PDF, DOC or TXT format), or one large printable version. Aside from the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion e-book which comes in PDF form, I can't provide such versions for other guides or articles for several reasons:

Bandwidth: Bandwidth costs money. The site has up to 700,000+ individual users who visit in any given month, so hosting downloadable versions of the guides would result in a massive increase in bandwidth, with each guide being several MB in size. Plus of course people would have to download each guide several times over time as they are regularly updated. The free edition of the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion alone already accounts for over 100GB of data transfer every month just by itself, so any more downloadable tweak guides would result in excessive costs to me, but more importantly, would effectively make TweakGuides.com just one big file server, which is not the intent of the site.

Traffic: It's simple - if my site doesn't get direct view traffic, it will die. I need people to visit the site often, to see the new content and read about upcoming projects, and to provide feedback. Downloadable and large one-page printable guides mean less direct traffic, fewer page views and hence the ultimate demise of my site due to lack of interest and hence lack of income. All sites on the internet require people to visit them directly - it's just a fact of life on the web.

Revenue: I need people to visit the site directly to provide some revenue through things like advertising and donations, so I can pay for site costs and have income to live on. Without this revenue I simply cannot keep investing time and effort into this site, and I will eventually cease writing guides. Game guides have already been ceased as of late 2008 for this reason.

So the bottom line is that unless I get some site sponsors then I am bound by the way the internet works - to attract more direct view traffic to the site. This keeps the content free to you, it keeps it independent, it gives me motivation to spend many, many hours researching and writing the guides and it means the quality of my guides are the best they can be.