Question

Is it possible to use JavaScript to trigger a Flash object’s context-menu ‘Print’ action?

Background: I have a page whose main content consists of a Flash object. I need to print this page via JavaScript, which I’m doing with window.print.

Unfortunately, it seems that Firefox has a bug (for the past eight years) whereby Flash content does not appear in printouts. My research has turned up no way around this, save for some hacks that require access to the Flash source, which I don’t have.

Since the Flash content is the most important part of the page, I could get away with just printing that, as via the Flash right-click context-menu ‘print’ action. I would like the user-experience to at least remain the same, i.e. they click my ‘Print’ button, and I employ a browser-detect hack to either use window.print or Flash’s own printing. For this to work, I need a way to trigger that action on the Flash object.

Answer 1

You can use the ExternalInterface class to access the PrintJob class. You can read about those here.