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I'm trying to save some web pages to PDF using Python, Selenium, and Chrome, and I can't get the printer to default to Chrome's built-in "save as PDF" option.

I have found examples of how to do this in various places online, including in questions people have asked on Stack Overflow, but they way they're all implementing it doesn't work and I'm not sure if something has changed in more recent versions of Chrome, or if I'm somehow doing something wrong (for example, here is a page that has these settings: Missing elements when using selenium chrome driver to automatically 'Save as PDF').

I only included the default download location change in this code to verify it's accepting any changes at all - if you download one of the Python installs from that page, it will download to the new location and not to the standard download folder, so Chrome seems to be accepting these changes.

The problem appears to be the option "selectedDestinationID", which doesn't seem to do anything. 

from selenium import webdriver
import time
import json

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

app_state = {
        'recentDestinations': [{
            'id': 'Save as PDF',
            'origin': 'local'
        }],
        'selectedDestinationId': 'Save as PDF',
        'version': 2
    }



prefs = {
    'printing.print_preview_sticky_settings.appState': json.dumps(app_state),
    'download.default_directory': 'c:\\temp\\seleniumtesting\\'
    }
chrome_options.add_experimental_option('prefs', prefs)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='C:\\temp\\seleniumtesting\\chromedriver.exe', options=chrome_options)

driver.get('https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-373/')

time.sleep(25)
driver.close()

After the page launches, hitting ctrl+p brings up the printing page, but it defaults to the default printer. If I bring up the same page in my standard Chrome installation, it defaults to printing to PDF. I want to get to the point where I can add kiosk printing and then call window.print(), but as of now all that does is send it to the actual paper printer.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer. I'm stumped, and at this point it probably would have been faster to just save all of these manually.

mikev
  • 9
  • 6

1 Answers1

1

It seems that if you have network printers configured they load up after opening the dialog and override your selectedDestination.

There is a preference "printing.default_destination_selection_rules" which seems to resolve.

prefs = {
    "printing.print_preview_sticky_settings.appState": json.dumps(app_state),
    "download.default_directory": "c:\\temp\\seleniumtesting\\".startswith(),
    "printing.default_destination_selection_rules": {
        "kind": "local",
        "namePattern": "Save as PDF",
    },
}

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/chrome/common/pref_names.cc#1318 https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#DefaultPrinterSelection

Beddow
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