Print a file from Watir

Question

I'm looking at Watir-Webdriver to manipulate a browser. In particular, I'd like to open a local file and print it to a PDF file.

Yes, wkhtmltopdf would be a good thing, but it's not working for me on debian squeeze, for reasons that are difficult to ascertain. The page contains Javascript, which rules out many html-to-pdf options. wkhtmltopdf works on OS X, same version (0.9.9), so I know it's not a problem with how I'm using it (PDFKit and Ruby). I'd just like to sidestep these issues and try a different way. Opening up chromium on debian shows a perfectly rendered page.

How does one "print" from Watir?

Edit: After more reading, I think there is no way to do this.

Answer 1

You could take a png sreenshot, then use the prawn gem to convert the png screenshot to a pdf:

require 'prawn'
require 'watir-webdriver'

b = Watir::Browser.start 'watirwebdriver.com'
b.driver.save_screenshot 'screenshot.png'
Prawn::Document.generate 'screenshot.pdf' do
  image 'screenshot.png', :scale => 0.5
end
b.close 

Answer 2

You'll need to use something that lets you do automation at the OS level. such as Autoit or maybe RAutomation. not sure what exists to do this on *nix operating systems.

Watir only drives the browser in terms of what is inside the browser window, it has very limited capability to work the menus of the browser itself.