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I'm in the beginning phases of developing a website. I want to be able to limit the amount of printing of web pages of circulars. These will be in an image format and usually consist of between 2 and 16 web pages. The circulars change each week.

Is there a way to limit the user to only 1 or X number of prints for each page and for each week? Is this easier done with standard web development or can it be done even easier in a content management system such as WordPress?

joeywheels
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  • You can't fully prevent anyone from printing web site contents. It's possible to prevent non-techies from printing the site, but since you can't detect when someone prints a web site it's impossible to limit printing to only some number of copies. – JJJ May 22 '14 at 20:27

1 Answers1

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Not unless you have full control over the client-side.

  • You can TRY to prevent that SAME computer (via cookie) from navigating to the same page twice.

  • If you are giving the user a unique ID to access the circular pages, you can mark that ID as already having displayed the pages.

But there is simply no way to make sure that the user can't call the print calls in the browser.

One trick, which a js hacker could easily get around.. tie into the page printed event. The answers to that question talk about just how poorly the events are supported, and not cross-browser. If this browser has already had that event fire, nav away or change the @media rule for printing to return css making the whole page display:none (or some trickery).

As far as the actual print dialog ("Copies: x"), there's nothing you can do.

Community
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Lynn Crumbling
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