Printing a page without displaying it?

Question

I have a page from which the user will be able to print. However, the page which will get printed is not the one the user is viewing, but rather a new one I'd like to generate on the background and (possibly) only show the print dialog for it.

Just to make things clear:

1. User is on "View.aspx" and clicks my Print button (not the browser's one).
2. The Print button loads the content of "Printable.aspx" and displays a print dialog for it while the user is still on "View.aspx".

FYI, what I'm trying to avoid is to have the "Printable.aspx" open in a new window and then show its print dialog.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use a combination of MEDIA tags in CSS to show/hide objects for printing.

<STYLE type="text/css">
@media print {
   .PrintOnly {font-size: 10pt; line-height: 120%; background: white;}
}
@media screen {
   .PrintOnly {display: none}
}
</STYLE>

You can make controls that are style Display:none on media screen, so the user only sees them when printing.

<DIV class="PrintOnly>
This control will only show up during printing
</DIV>

Any of your controls can be classed as "PrintOnly" so you only see them when printing. You just need to have the css class defined once for "@media screen" and once for "@media print" to ensure they behave differently.

You can also bring in an entire stylesheet for print-only.

<LINK rel="stylesheet" type"text/css" href="screen.css" media="screen">
<LINK rel="stylesheet" type"text/css" href="print.css" media="print">

Answer 2

I don't think what you are trying for is possible. But I could be wrong. Though the better way to approach this is to use a different css stylesheet.

Answer 3

You could load the page into a hidden IFrame element, then use javascript to execute the print function of that page.

But, like @carter suggested, CSS is the better approach. Why load duplicate content more than once when you can just restyle the current content?

• It's also suggested in this question to use CSS: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/580941/how-to-print-the-contents-of-a-hidden-iframe
• This is a good resource for using the CSS way of printing: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/

Answer 4

When the Print button is clicked, add the Printable.aspx into a hidden panel of view.aspx. Respond by adding javascript into the onload event of view.aspx & print the hidden panel with window.print()