howto send a whole smarty page to a printer

Hi I am using smarty with my php site, I know you can send a whole smarty template page to a variable, is their any way i can easily print that variable out. or am i going about this the wrong way. I basically want to print the output of the page directly to the printer. I find using the Internet Explorer Print Page button, prints extra text on the top and bottom of the page, which i dont want, also it seems to effect my page formatting a little. any help would be appreciated Thanks steve