How to Open Print Friendly Page Windows?

Question

Our users can currently select a number of funds from a page and go to another page to see the funds compared on a chart. I now have to present the user with an option to produce a print-friendly fact sheet page for each fund in the chart.

The requirement is that each page will open in a new window (or tab), and be minimised so as not to be 'too intrusive' when they're opened. Can somebody suggest how I could go about this? This also means that the user will have to go to each window or tab to print the page.

They also want the print dialog box open in each of the new windows so the user doesn't have to open it. Is this possible, for the print dialog to open at the page load? If so, can somebody suggest how - JavaScript?

I disagree that (up to) 10 new windows can ever be anything but intrusive! Ideally I could send these new pages directly to the print queue. Is this possible?

Otherwise, I could Generate a page dynamically for each fund, strip out the contents of the page body and add the content for that fund to a large single page print-friendly factsheet. Does anyone have experience in this kind of work? Any pointers?

Answer 1

several points

• you cant control new tabs vs new windows, this is a browser setting.
• if its tabs, you can only have one print dialog per browser instance (depends on browser, but generally speaking). It tends to be modal.
• you can call window.print() on page load to trigger the print dialog automatically, but its not very user-friendly

Whats the problem with creating a print friendly css and simply having a print button on the page that calls window.print();