How to print directly to the printer?

[jlcsusara]

Hi!

I'm an absolute beginner when it comes to PHP and Javascript.

How do I print a report (outputted as a PDF) directly to the printer?

Thanks in advance!

--Jonathan

[steven]

Johnathon,

You can't print directly to the printer from a browser without some kind of 3rd party product. (http://www.meadroid.com/scriptx/)

The best you can do with JavaScript is use window.print().

This will bring up a dialog box, but you still have to click print.

(If you could, people could create malicious web pages that would use up all the paper in your printer)

Steven

[jlcsusara]

Thanks, Steven... good point.

[admin]

.

[MichaelD]

I just encountered this "problem" and solved it for me. Maybe it is also useful for others.

Printing of PDFs can be automatically started via javascript.

Please note that JavaScript in PDF is much different from Javascript in HTML. The first is executed by (usually) Acrobat while second uses the API of the Webbrowser.

One condition is that the user has not disabled Javascript in Acrobat.

There's a little addon which allows to add Javascript in PDFs when using FPDF:
http://www.fpdf.de/downloads/addons/36/
I downloaded the zip and placed fpdf_js.php in the FPDF subfolder of nubuilder.

Then I changed "run_report_pdf_v2.php": (make a backup copy of this file before altering)
After the line

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require('fpdf/fpdf.php');

I added this line:

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require('fpdf/pdf_js.php');

I changed this line:

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class nuPDF extends FPDF{

To:

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class nuPDF extends PDF_Javascript{

Then I added the following method (can be pasted above "function __construct ...")

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function AutoPrint($dialog=true)
    {
        $param=($dialog ? 'true' : 'false');
        $script="print($param);";
        $this->IncludeJS($script);
    }

Finally I added the following line in the function "build_report" below "$pdf = new nuPDF(..."

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$pdf->Autoprint(true);

This should Acrobat let show automatically the Print Dialog when any PDF is generated via nuBuilder.
To suppress the Print-Dialog pass "false" to the Autoprint function.

Maybe there's a more elegant way to implement this (without patching the source). I would be happy to read about this.

[admin]

Thanks Michael.