Some pages on our site have a "Print this page" link which opens a popup window where the user can email the content to someone else using a form.
Our implementation uses jQuery to:
1. copy the content from the window that opened the popup, using window.opener.document
2. filter the contents of the copied content
3. put it in the textarea
<script type='text/javascript'>
$(function () {
// get the content based on id of the div -- ie, id="main-content-wrapper"
// call .clone() so that subsequent .remove() calls do not affect the original window.opener.document
var content = $('#main-content-wrapper', window.opener.document).clone();
// remove the elements that we don't want displayed in our form
$('ul.page-tools', content).remove();
$('ul.breadcrumbs', content).remove();
$('p.return', content).remove();
// paste the content into a textarea input field with id="emailContent"
// calling .children() because the content we have has lots of intervening divs
// in your case this may not be needed, so just use content.html()
$("#emailContent").html(content.children().html());
})
</script>
Btw, our implementation uses CKEditor javascript library so the emailContent textarea will display the content as HTML.