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I am having a really hard time figuring out how I am going to handle printing in my Nodejs application. I have a website where there is a bunch of purchase numbers. I want the users to print this numbers in a click of a button. These numbers are dynamically generated after querying the database.

I started using this npm library to print the purchase number. When I am developing in my local computer this library is working fine. I made it so that each time the user presses a button in the front end, I make a post request to my Nodejs Server which prints to the printer that I configured locally.

The problem is that I want to eventually deploy my website to Heroku. Website will be used by a group of people sharing the same network and printer. I do not know of a way to set heroku to communicate with the printer using this package.

I also thought that printing directly from the front end might be a better idea, but I have to open google on kiosk mode and then do the same for all the users that are going to use this website. Also, most of the users will be using a tablet device so configuring printer in those devices will be difficult as well.

I did not find anything online that I can use as a reference. Any advice or suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Amiga500
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jedu
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    You do realize that you cannot command your user's printer from your node application right? – Laurentiu Turcu Aug 15 '19 at 06:53
  • Calling `window.print()` on the frontend is really all you can do. It's 2019, one can connect a tablet with a printer. – Jonas Wilms Aug 15 '19 at 07:03
  • I was thinking of a third party software that i can configure to communicate with my Nodejs server. The third party software will be running on the LAN. When the user clicks the button a request will be sent to Nodejs server which will in turn send a request to the software and print the label. – jedu Aug 15 '19 at 16:34

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As for nodeJs printing I have no experience. It seems that you can use certain packages to print a pdf as given in the example answer here: Node.js : How to add print job to printer.

As for generating from html to PDF, that should be easy to find, less easy to style correctly though. I would recommend doing it from HTML (you could still do the PDF conversion for more stable printing results)

From HTML

As stated, the API is rather limited, you can use window.print to request a print action.

Note though that you have some options to make your life better when calling window.print().

You can create the page in a separate window to get rid of bloat, like navigation etc, or you could actually hide that with css.

You might already be aware of css being included for certain targets e.g. for your website you probably want to use the screen target, but you can create a separate stylesheet for printing.

More info at mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Printing

Mathijs Segers
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