Silverlight content only prints in IE (for now)

Last night I made a simple Silverlight maze generator for my 6 year old daughter, who's really into mazes right now. When I tried to print the resulting mazes, I found that the Silverlight content was was blank in Firefox (left), but worked in IE (right):

Silverlight-FF2-Print-PreviewSilverlight-IE7-Print-Preview

The official word seems to be that printing Silverlight 1.1 content is unsupported, but is being considered as a 1.1 feature. It sounds like some people are coming up with some clever hacks to handle printing Silverlight content, but I'm hoping that print support is added to 1.1. In addition to a nice application framework, Silverlight's vector based content could be a great print format which would eliminate the need for PDF downloads in many cases.

6 Comments

  • "Silverlight's vector based content could be a great print format which would eliminate the need for PDF downloads in many cases."

    Flash is vector based and it hasn't eliminated the need for PDF's. Why do you think that will change with Silverlight?

  • @Scott - I don't think it would eliminate the need for PDF in general, just in many cases. If I need to e-mail or save information, I'll need PDF (or XPS).

    But what about something simple like printing out tickets with directions, printing product assembly directions, or something like a map. I don't want a file, just a printout.

    Printing HTML with CSS is quirky, rendered bitmaps aren't interactive, and file downloads are often unnecessary. As a web developer, I'd sometimes like to be able to present something that could just print nicely.

    Come to think of it, a map is the example I should have used - it'd be nice to do client siee annotations on a Silverlight based map, then print it out without some crazy shenanigans to send my annotations to the server.

  • Microsft try to get this to monopolise the use of Internet Exploiter instead of the others alternative, i hope this will be available for the other browser because if not it will be a flop

  • native printing support which outputs to .NET using sometype of IPC channel would be great

  • As a follow up. If we had some way to output content in bitmap form then we could post that data to a server side script which could package it as needed

  • Is there any way to print from silverlight application ?

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