Printing a PDF file with Electron JS

Question

I am trying to create an Electron JS app that has the purpose to print letter size PDFs.

This is my snippet of code for printing:

win = new BrowserWindow         


        

Answer 1

So it seems like you're trying to download the pdf file rather than print a pdf of the current screen which is what print tries to do. As such, you have a couple of options.

1) Disable the native pdf viewer in electron:

If you don't care about the electron window displaying the pdf, disabling the native pdf viewer in electron should instead cause it to treat the file as a download and attempt to download it.

new BrowserWindow({
  webPreferences: {
    plugins: false
  }
})

You may also want to checkout electron's DownloadItem api to do some manipulation on where the file will be saved.

2) Download the pdf through some other api

I'm not gonna give any specifics for this one because you should be able to find some information on this yourself, but basically if you want to download the file from somewhere, then you can use some other download API like an AJAX library to download the file and save it somewhere. This would potentially allow you to render the document in an electron window as well, since once you initiate the download you can probably redirect the window to the pdf url and have the native viewer handle it.

Long story short, it sounds to me like you don't really want to print from electron, you just want to save the pdf file that you're displaying. Printing from electron will render what you see on the screen, not the pdf document itself so I think you just misunderstood what the goal of print was. Hopefully this helps you, good luck!

=== EDIT ===

Unfortunately, I don't believe that there is a way to print the file directly from electron since electron printing is for printing the contents of electrons display. But you should be able to download the file via a simple request for the file (see above).

My recommendation for you would be to create a page for previewing the file. This would be an independent page, not the built in pdf viewer. You can then insert a button somewhere on the page to download the pdf via some means and skip any save location prompts (this should be easy enough to find documentation for).

Then, in order to have your preview, on the same page you can have a webview tag into your page, which will display the native pdf viewer. In order for the native pdf viewer to work in the webview tag, you must include the plugins attribute in the tag. It's a boolean tag, so it's mere presence is all that is needed such as This turns on plugin support for that webview's renderer which is required for the pdf viewer.

You can modify the size styling of this tag on the page as you wish to suit your needs. A trick to get rid of the download and print options so that a user cannot press them is to append #toolbar=0 to the end of the pdf url to prevent the native pdf viewer from displaying the top toolbar with these buttons.

So, this way you can have your preview, ensure that the user can't use the built in download or print from the pdf viewer with the extra ui, and you can add another button to download it so it can be printed later.