How to print a conversation without the quoted messages on each conversation message

Question

I've got a long email string in Gmail that I want to export a PDF of.

I use Gmail web client on my computer running the latest version of chrome (as of the time of writing 100.x)

I would normally just go to the print icon in Gmail and then print as PDF, but this includes all of the emails, plus all of the previous emails being responded to copied below, this means a string of 5 emails back and forth contains lots of duplicated information. Is there a way I can limit the output to just the email and responses, but not copies of the previous responses each time?

Answer 1

Use JavaScript, the DOM Web API and a CSS selector to hide the quoted messages.

One way to do this is the following:

1. Open the conversation and click the print button. This will open a new window/tab showing the conversation to be printed and the print dialog.

2. Close the print dialog

3. Open the web-browser developer tools (press F12)

4. On the developers tools console write the following, then press enter

   document.querySelectorAll('blockquote').forEach(e => e.style = 'display:none;');
   

   The above will hide the quoted messages. This works because the quoted messages are put inside a blockquote HTML tags.

5. Print

Answer 2

I am using Firefox, I assume the same thing exists in Chrome.

I found a conversation of 8 messages, and opened it.

If I click on the print icon, I see it says print all. And sure enough I get an 19 page pdf. It has a lot of duplicated material.

To get a more compact print I do the following:

• Click on a specific message in the conversation;
• Click on the three dots on the right hand side.
• The menu that pops up has a print command. Select it
• When the print windows open I can see it is only 3 pages long. And it only made up of what was in that specific message.