Silent printing in electron

Question

I am currently building an electron app. I have a PDF on my local file system which I need to silently print out (on the default printer). I came across the node-printer library

Answer 1

To my knowledge there is currently no way to do this directly using Electron because while using contents.print([]) does allow for 'silently' printing HTML files, it isn't able to print PDF views. This is currently an open feature request: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/9029

Edit: I managed to work around this by converting the PDF to a PNG and then using Electron's print functionality (which is able to print PNGs) to print the image based view. One of the major downsides to this is that all of the PDF to PNG/JPEG conversion libraries for NodeJS have a number of dependencies, meaning I had to implement them in an Express server and then have my Electron app send all PDFs to the server for conversion. It's not a great option, but it does work.