printing or print preview on CrossBrowserTesting?
Is there any way I can print the results of a “live test” on CrossBrowserTesting? Or, if I can’t do that, is there some way I can get a “print preview” so I can see what I’d get if I were able to print?
I’m asking because I’m faced with the following problem: On my site, I have a “print page” (I mean a page which is designed to provide a good-looking print out). The code is valid (both html and css). I work on a Mac running OS 10.5.6.
When I print the page from my computer, using Safari, the results are fine. When I view the page using IE 7 on CrossBrowserTesting it looks fine too. However when I did a test printing yesterday from a PC (in an internet café) the results were terrible: the font-size was much larger and the entire content was shifted to the right. As a result the bottom and the right-hand side were both cut off.
Naturally I would like to be able to use CrossBrowserTesting to help me find a solution to this problem, but to do that I would (at least) have to be able to print from the live test or see a print preview there.
Any comments or suggestions would be very welcome.
regards to all from flunn
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Hi Flunn,
Interesting use case - I had never thought about this need, but pretty obvious once you stated it. I have had my own troubles in the past getting the print version of a site to look decent.
I tried a couple of things, leveraging the ability you have with our solution (and precious few of our competitors) to actually alter the remote configuration:
1) On the configuration I choose to test in (WinXP with latest browsers) IE seemed to allow you to do a print preview without any defined printers, but Firefox would not. So I went through the process to add a printer:
- Start
- Control Panel
- Printers
- Add printer
- Next, unchecked automatically detect with PNP, next, LPT1, selected printer (HP, HP Laserjet 4 in my case), Next, don't print a test page, Finish.
This allows you to do a print preview in Firefox (and possibly others), so this may help. You can definitely take a snapshot using our camera tool at the top of the console to make an image of how the page will appear.
2) The second thing I tried was putting a print driver on the system which allowed printing to a pdf file. Once you have printed to this pdf file, you can use the browser to log into gmail (or other) and mail the file to yourself. You could then print it. This printing arena is not a specialty for me, so I cannot promise that it will render exactly, but it looked 'right' when I tried it. On the configuration I had loaded, I went to http://www.dopdf.com/ and hit the get it button. I went through the install (it was straightforward) and set it as the default printer. When you print a web page, it asks you what file to save the output as and creates a pdf. I then mailed this to myself.
I did not do extensive testing of this, but hopefully one of these 2 ideas may help. Please post any results of your testing - I am sure this will help others in the future.
Thanks
Ken
p.s. A note about loading software on our configurations. Since we boot all our configurations from a locked down image, feel free to install software you need! When you are done, the remote configuration is restarted, and it reverts to its 'clean' state. There are several advantages to this - being able to add your own printer driver is just one.