Just print!

In my ePoS system project, I have the need to open a popup with javascript and print the contents without seeing the dialog box.

Everywhere I searched, there were the ‘you don’t wanna do that because….’ from know it all keyboard warriors saying it was bad because evil doers could send porn to your printer.

What about intranets and web apps?

Finally, I figured it out and as long as you’re using Firefox and you have access to it then you’re ready to make it print without a nasty dialog…

• Open firefox and put about:config in the address bar and press enter (you will need to click the button that shows to say you know what you’re doing)
• Type print.always_print_silent in the filter box at the top
  If you have an entry already there and it is set to false just right click it and choose ‘toggle’ to set it to true.
  If there is no entry there already then follow on…
  • right click the screen and choose New->boolean
  • enter print.always_print_silent as the preference name when asked and press enter
  • set boolean value to true and press enter

That’s it, you will no longer see the dialog box when you print. Beware though, it will try to print to the last printer you used when you had the dialog box open. If you ever need to change it then you will need to toggle the value for print.always_print_silent by following the above steps.

Open a javascript popup and print the contents

Now you can print without dialogs, you can use the following code to open a popup window and print it.

open the popup


windowname = window.open('url.html','name',options);


the options you have available are:

For example, to open a pop window showing the file called example.html with no menu bar, with a width of 430 pixels, height of 700 pixels, no toolbar, with scrollbars and with the window you would use this command


winname = window.open('/example.html','newwin','menubar=no,width=430,height=700,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,screenX=300');


To close that window, you can add this


winname.close();


To print the window, you can add this to the example.html page


self.print();


or to print it from the calling page, you might need to pause for a little while before issuing the print command so it has time to load the page content first..


setTimeout("winname.window.print();",500);


All the commands need to be within <script> /script tags

So I was checking out my performancing advert on Randa Clays’ post about Trying out Google Chrome and I thought I’d give it a go myself.

ummm, could it be any faster? I thought it was obviously taking the piss somewhere. How come my site can load this fast? For the past few months I have been getting quite frustrated with how my sites perform when I load them in Firefox, even so far as to break out IE and use that when I have a lot of posts to write!!

That got me thinking, I love Firefox and its awfully good plugins like the web developer and such, I use them like.every.day but, is it slowing down because of all these extras? the answer is yes, yes it is.

That also got me thinking, is it faster because it’s new? probably just like when you get a new install of Windows and it loads up in seconds and programs don’t take an age to show the splash page only to go back to ‘normal’ within a few weeks of using (or in my case, within a day of me installing all the developer suite stuff)

But fast right? that’s what everyone is saying and for the life of me I can’t believe how much faster my pages load, all my sites seem to appear as if they were on another tab, hell even Firefox lately has been taking longer to switch to a new tab than it does for this thing to load my page afresh!

But no plugins right? well, to be honest, the only plugins that I absolutely need are the web developer ones and while I was checking out my CommentLuv site to see if the AJAX works on the settings page I noticed it didn’t show the form box for changing the cache age… dammit, that’s why it works so well, it’s half arsed!! but, nope, it was entirely my own fault…

It turns out that Chrome has it’s own debugger and source viewer with bells and whistles, I needed to know how to use the debugging console and I found this post by Eric about Basic information on Chromes’ Debugger.

By using the breakpoint function I was able to step through the code and find out exactly where the problem was occurring. It turns out that I had (again) put <script type=javascript etc in a file I was calling as src=.

So, now I am converted to Chrome. It does all that I need and does it fast. You should try out Chrome Browser for yourself, it downloads and installs quite quickly and has some nice features that are done well enough to make them look simple