The key "trick" is that we can execute JavaScript in the selenium browser window using the "execute_script" method of the selenium webdriver, and if you execute the JavaScript command "window.print();" it will activate the browsers print function.
Now, getting it to work elegantly requires setting a few preferences to print silently, remove print progress reporting, etc. Here is a small but functional example that loads up and prints whatever website you put in the last line (where 'http://www.cnn.com/' is now):
import time
from selenium import webdriver
import os
class printing_browser(object):
def __init__(self):
self.profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
self.profile.set_preference("services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", False)
self.profile.set_preference("pdfjs.disabled", True)
self.profile.set_preference("print.always_print_silent", True)
self.profile.set_preference("print.show_print_progress", False)
self.profile.set_preference("browser.download.show_plugins_in_list",False)
self.driver = webdriver.Firefox(self.profile)
time.sleep(5)
def get_page_and_print(self, page):
self.driver.get(page)
time.sleep(5)
self.driver.execute_script("window.print();")
if __name__ == "__main__":
browser_that_prints = printing_browser()
browser_that_prints.get_page_and_print('http://www.cnn.com/')
The key command you were probably missing was "self.driver.execute_script("window.print();")" but one needs some of that setup in init to make it run smooth so I thought I'd give a fuller example. I think the trick alone is in a comment above so some credit should go there too.