Monday, August 27, 2012

Chrome printing issues

Over the past few weeks, the current version of Chrome has posed several problems printing. As more schools use Google Apps for Education and switch to using Chrome as a browser (still a far superior browser compared to IE), it is important to make sure the basic needs are met--like printing.

As helpful advice to fellow teachers and instructional/technological leaders, here are some "quick" fixes to the Chrome/PDF viewer print dialog issues.

Problem summary: When attempting to print in Chrome (any application), the user can press Ctrl+P, click the print button on the application, or go to File-->Print. In all three cases, the print dialog box (a Chrome-generated PDF viewer) fails to appear. Therefore, documents fail to print. There is no quick print feature.

Fixes:

  1. Hold down Ctrl+Shift+P to print. This will generate the PDF viewer.
  2. Open another computer application like MS Word, prompt Word to print and then, return to Chrome and print. 
  3. Close out of Chrome (sometimes multiple times are necessary) and reopen Chrome.
Various forums suggest enabling the PDF viewer add-in (though, it is enabled by default). However, this does not seem to be the case in many instances. The important part is to provide staff with a simple set of fixes they can do in order to make the "clean-up" smooth and easy. 

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