Firefox command line print - windows

Have a requirement to print html or html from vb6 application using only firefox as we have already for IE. So, need command to print using firefox.exe.
Something like this firefox.exe -print http://www.google.com which is not working. Is there anyway to do this? Thanks for your help.

There is no built-in support for a -print command line switch. See this document for the different command line switches supported for the Firefox browser. Support for such functionality would most probably have to be implemented through an extension.
If no extension exists that currently offers what your looking for, a Google search yielded this mozillaZine forum thread: "Printing to file from Commandline?" You could have a look at the discussion, or download and modify the referenced add-on from the source link.
Or else, you could always create your own application (probably not in VB6) by embedding the Gecko layout, but since the Mozilla killed the embedding API a while back, you'll have a lot of integration work to do (or else you could go with another layout engine like Webkit).

You can use the built in webbrowser control to print html via IE: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?384076-Webbrowser-Control-Tip-and-Examples
If you must use firefox, there was a firefox active x control but I have not used it and dont know the status:
mozilla firefox activeX
or
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm
or
https://bitbucket.org/geckofx
It also looks like there is a webkit floating around online (google it)

Related

Use Firefox 'print' or 'save as' features using Selenium WebDriver

I would like to programatically instruct Firefox to visit a list of URLs (defined in a text file, for instance) and for each of them save the page to disk or print it.
I know Selenium provides a feature to capture a screenshot of the page, but I would like to know if it's possible to use browser's native saving and printing features.
If Selenium does not provide such features, would any other tool allow me to define a script to be executed by Firefox and achieve similar results?
It is possible to enable silent printing in firefox to print to the default printer, bypassing the print dialog.
The required firefox preference is print.always_print_silent, and can be setup with selenium like so:
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
/* ... */
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setPreference("print.always_print_silent", true);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);
Now simply navigate to a web page and call print using javascript:
driver.get("http://www.google.com");
((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("window.print();");
Additionally, couple this with a free PDF printer such as novaPDF to print without displaying the Save as dialog and automatically save a PDF to a predefined location.
If you are fine with png format, you can take full page screenshot.
import selenium.webdriver
import selenium.common
options = selenium.webdriver.firefox.options.Options()
# options.headless = True
with selenium.webdriver.Firefox(options=options) as driver:
driver.get('http://google.com')
time.sleep(2)
root=driver.find_element_by_tag_name('html')
root.screenshot('full page screenshot.png')
Normally you would do this using Sikuli API. The open source community (a.k.a. Mozilla foundation) is working on a project called Marionette that supposedly will enable you do do these things without using screenshot matching but it's still alpha and they are still working on it and Chrome and IE haven't signed onto it yet.
It should be noted that on native file downloads, you don't really need to test the browser functionality of the already well tested save-as dialog. What Selenium testers usually do is just download the file with Apache HttpUtils or something similar and just bypass the browser on the download step. Then you don't need to use the Save-As dialog and it will work cross-browser. Just use selenium to get the download URL and download it with Java code instead.
Maybe this can helps you...
https://stackoverflow.com/a/64987078/6003328
I made this using python...
Basically, I change the about:config settings for each print, adjusting the filename of the pdf to be created, and setting the printer as always_print_silent: true...

Using Headless FireFox to Save All HTML files using command line in Linux

Using shell_exec with Xvfb and FireFox currently to capture screen shots. However, need to download the entire html (e.g. Save Page As --> Web Page complete.) to a directory using shell_exec. Have looked at all the different option available in the Mozilla Developers Forums but have not been able to figure out how to do this.
This code appears to be what I might need but where and how is this implemented so it can be accessible in shell_exec?
var file = Components.classes["#mozilla.org/file/local;1"]
.createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsILocalFile);
file.initWithPath("C:\\filename.html");
var wbp = Components.classes['#mozilla.org/embedding/browser/nsWebBrowserPersist;1']
.createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIWebBrowserPersist);
wbp.saveDocument(content.document, file, null, null, null, null);
The Above Code Source
void saveDocument(
in nsIDOMDocument aDocument,
in nsISupports aFile,
in nsISupports aDataPath,
in string aOutputContentType,
in unsigned long aEncodingFlags,
in unsigned long aWrapColumn
);
The Above Code Source
There is a Stackoverflow manual solution here but it does not address shell_exec:
How to save a webpage locally including pictures,etc
There are few options that I know of, but none that I know are fitting your question exactly..
Open firefox http://yoursite.com from shell, then send keystrokes to firefox using xte or similar method. (This is not headless mode though.)
Download using wget. It can work in recursive manner. Or alternately you can parse the HTML, if it is quite simple web page. If you need to submit form, use curl instead of wget.
Use greasemonkey addon & write a script, which would get loaded on http://some-fake-page.com/?download=http://yoursite.com & then open firefox with that fake-page url.
Develop your own firefox addon to do above work.
There may be other better options for this as well, but I don't know them.

Render HTML as Firefox would, without running Firefox

What command-line utility renders HTML as Firefox would, creating a
static image, without actually running Firefox and xwd (or ScreenGrab,
etc)?
Since all of Firefox's rendering libraries are open source, I'm
assuming someone's written something like this? It would be very
useful.
I realize static images can't have Flash animation (animated GIF/PNG
notwithstanding), JavaScript, etc, so I'm just looking for something
that renders plain HTML.
html2ps is worth a try, although it does not seem to use the css style sheets. This is a serious limitation.
On Debian/Ubuntu, it is provided as a package, so the classical sudo apt-get install html2ps will be fine.
(I know this has been given in the comments, but for the future reader, I thought it might be easier to find as an answer.)
You could write a small script which simply runs firefox using the command line options does a screen-shot, then closes firefox. Should only be about 3 lines of code to get started.
firefox -url http://mysite.com/homepage.php
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Command_Line_Options

Location of Firefox throbber/spinner image

I'm trying to locate the "throbber" (or "spinner") image used in the Firefox 3.6x chrome to show that a request is being processed:
Firefox throbber http://i49.tinypic.com/kd7bth.png
I'm not familiar with the source code structure for Firefox, and a simple search hasn't yielded the answer.
Does anyone know which file I'm looking for? (E.g. can you provide a link to the file in the Mercurial repository, or tell me how to find it?).
Inside of your Firefox installation it's inside chrome/classic.jar, the path is: skin/classic/global/media/throbber.png
I'm not sure where it is in the Mozilla repository though.
Here's some info on how to customize it: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Throbber_URL

Browser add-on to find a download's origin

Back in the earlier days of the internet I remember that in certain browsers, every time you downloaded an image or a file, the URL of where that file was downloaded from would be written into that file's properties (I guess the summary tab?). I think Netscape v2 did this if I remember correctly.
I really miss that kind of functionality as every once in a while I'll run into a neat little program stored somewhere in the depths of my hard drive and wonder where I got it from originally.
I googled around but I'm not quite sure what terms to use to describe what I'm looking for. So I'm wondering if anyone knows of a Firefox plug-in or something similar that would do this?
If you use the DownThemAll! extension for Firefox, you can tell it to prepend the URL of the site to the downloaded file name...
thus you end up with files like:
download.com_utils_compression_ABCD32.exe
It also works really well when you want to download/queue a bunch of files.
You download http://example.com/foo to ~/Desktop/foo, and you want to see the originating URL in the properties of the local file foo?
Back when I used OS X, I remember Safari used to record the original URL in the resource fork of the downloaded file. Can't remember what the named fork is, well, named, but it'll show up in the properties panel from Finder. Since it's there, Spotlight will probably index it, too, but I haven't used OS X since 10.3.
If you use Opera, and haven't cleared the file out from your download manager, select the download and it'll show the original URL that the file is from in the properties pane.
Is this what you want? If so... well, I don't know of a similar Firefox extension, but it'll clarify the question.
For the IE Browser I use the hell out of Fidler to look at all traffic going across the wire.
For FireFox, you can use the FireBug plugin. There is a "Net" tab that will show you request information that is going across the wire.
Most of the time you can use one of these tools to see what URL was requested in order to start a download. You can also view all the get and post information that might need to be sent in order to have your request succeed.
Fidler is here: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
FireBug is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Best of Luck!

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