HackerDan.com

One of the popular requests relating to the grade statics project from the Moodle community was a printer versions of the statics and visualizations. This is rather trivial to do for the report/stats plug-in as all the content is text based however it becomes some what more complicated for report/visual as the content is flash based and more dynamic.

Some browsers play nice when printing a page with flash content on it and will treat it like an image (as shown in scan below of a print out of the demo site in fire fox).

This would allow for a printer friendly page to be made that would work with browsers that print flash content by creating a page with just the visualizations on it and a slightly modified interface. However there is another method that i have started looking in to that might give even better results.

Flash it’s self has support for printing witch can be some what controlled from the flash (or flex in this case) application running in the browser, allowing for better resolution prints (as flash graphics are vector based) and allows for printing with in the application rather then having to load a new page.

A simple example of this can be seen in the right click menu over a flash application witch gives a print option.

Unfortunately, currently my application dose not quite print an accurate representation of the visualization using this method as can be seen below in a scan of the printed page.

So the next step in the goal for a printer friendly flash/flex application is research the printing functions and abilities of action script and flex and then to try implementing a solution witch will ideally hide the visualization’s controls (buttons) and then print the visualization at the correct size to match that of the paper it is being printed on.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Adobe Flex, Moodle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.