Print one page of WebBrowser

Question

I am trying to automate printing of intranet websites. Since this is an application that will be put on a specific user's computer, which will be run on an as-needed basis, I'd like it to be as un-disruptive as possible (in other words, not launching IE for each page). The catch is that I need to print the first page of the website and then print the whole website again, which will produce the first page two times. What is the best way to do this?

I have no problem getting it to loop through the pages that it needs to print, nor do I have a problem opening the page with webbrowser. I do, however, have a problem specifying a print range.

I also tried PrintDocument, but couldn't figure out how to get that to open within the form.

Thanks for any help that can be provided.

Answer 1

To download the pdf file, try this solution using iTextSharp: ITextSharp HTML to PDF?

Except with one substitution if you want to save directly to a file

private MemoryStream createPDF(string html)
{
    MemoryStream msOutput = new MemoryStream();
    TextReader reader = new StringReader(html);

    // step 1: creation of a document-object
    Document document = new Document(PageSize.A4, 30, 30, 30, 30);            

    // step 2:
    // we create a writer that listens to the document
    // and directs a XML-stream to a file
    PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, new FileStream("c:\\my.pdf", FileMode.Create));

    // step 3: we create a worker parse the document
    HTMLWorker worker = new HTMLWorker(document);

    // step 4: we open document and start the worker on the document
    document.Open();
    worker.StartDocument();

    // step 5: parse the html into the document
    worker.Parse(reader);

    // step 6: close the document and the worker
    worker.EndDocument();
    worker.Close();
    document.Close();

    return msOutput;
}

Once the PDF is set up, try ghostscript to print one page: Print existing PDF (or other files) in C#

If you start a shell execute of the process, you can use the command line arguments:

gsprint "filename.pdf" -from 1 - to 1

Alternatively, WebBrowser can just print the full page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b0wes9a3.aspx

I can't find anything referencing that WebBrowser itself can print "From page X to Y" without a print dialog.

Since I'm facing a similar problem, here's an alternate solution:

This open source project turns HTML documents to PDF documents similar to iTextSharp (http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/). We ended up not using iTextSharp because of several formatting issues with the way the site we wanted to print was laid out. We send command line arguments to turn the html downloaded using a webclient into a pdf file.

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
string htmlText = wc.DownloadString("http://websitehere.com);

Then, after turning to pdf, you can simply print the file:

Process p = new Process();
p.StartInfo.FileName = string.Format("{0}.pdf", fileLocation);
p.StartInfo.Verb = "Print";
p.Start();
p.WaitForExit();

(Apologies for C#, I'm more familiar with it than VB.NET, though it should be a simple conversion)