Printing issues

[fredkingham]

Issues 2 printing still painful.

[9:28] 
Specifically you have to shrink to fit prior to printing. Annoying.

can we take a print out of the patient lists and make sure it maps to what we're seeing the print preview, we do not expect this to be the case.

[fredkingham]

Note this looks fine on Chrome, print preview does not seem to be available on my local version on firefox.

On the test server, with the version of firefox used by doctors this is clearly an issue when you press landscape at the top (it defaults to portrait and works ok in portrait but this is not how our users want to use it)

[pacharanero]

I also find that printing looks fine in Chrome.

In Firefox the printing experience depends a lot on your system print dialog, which of course will vary between OS and even between actual machines, in terms of the default printer settings.

Requirements

1. The print dialog for Elcid lists should default to Landscape
2. The print dialog should auto-scale the content to fit the paper optimally.

Ideas

• Apparently there are some CSS settings that essentially provide metadata for printed representations of pages: @media and suchlike. Here's a SO question on the subject: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9288049/how-to-print-landscape-automatically-with-mozilla-browser. Unfortunately Firefox does not support the setting which I think we would need.

• PDF generation - this is AFAIAA how Chrome does its printing anyway. Could we generate a PDF server-side? This should provide us more control over the representation, but may not iron out all the issues with scaling and defaulting to Landscape. Django docs have some info on this: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/howto/outputting-pdf/

• Presumably the system print dialog can be set to print in Landscape and Shrink To Fit by default, but the problem is that users don't want to do this because it affects other things you want to print from the same machine. We could, as a fairly lame workaround, in the event of no other option being suitable, create more than one printer instance on each machine, enabling Firefox to use a printer with landscape defaults, and other applications to use different defaults. However this is a bit hacky, right?

[davidmiller]

PDF generation is a massive can of worms, and would like to avoid if at all possible !

I'd really quite like to understand what the issues are / have a clear way to reproduce... It's possible that this only exists on the printer/OS/browser conversation on a specific ward at UCH...