Print PDF in Firefox

Question

How to print a PDF in Firefox?

This function works in Chrome but not in Firefox

function print_pdf(url){
    var id = \'iframe\', html = \'');
    $('#foo').append(iFrameJQueryObject);
}
print_pdf('mozilla_generated.pdf');

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Chrome: Security Error (cross-origin)

The pdf should be located at the same host. Firefox was okay with other domains in my tests, but chrome gave me cross-origin errors.

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Firefox: Printed page includes about:blank only

You will get an empty page in firefox (jsfiddle), because it will print the iframe before it has loaded any content. Mentioned methods like $(document).onload() won't help, since they only wait for the DOM to load and setTimeout() can still result in errors, since you do not know how long it takes the iFrame to load.

You can simply resolve this issue by using jQuery's load(). (doc) This will give you the possibility to use a callback function as parameter.

if a "complete" callback is provided, it is executed after post-processing and HTML insertion has been performed. The callback is fired once for each element in the jQuery collection, and this is set to each DOM element in turn.

Code Example 1

function print_pdf(url){
    var id = 'iframe', html = '';
    $('body').append(html);
    // wait for the iFrame to fully load and call the print() function afterwards
    $('#' + id).load(function () {
        document.getElementById(id).contentWindow.print();
    });
}

Alternatively you could directly create an jQuery object and use jQuery's on() (doc) to attach any event handler.

Code Example 2 (jsfiddle)

function print_pdf(url){
    var iFrameJQueryObject = $('');
    $('body').append(iFrameJQueryObject);
    iFrameJQueryObject.on('load', function(){
        $(this).get(0).contentWindow.print();
    });
}