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How to Print a Page to PDF

Intro​

Some pages are made to be printed: an invoice, a boarding pass, a report. Their print version can look different from the screen (a print stylesheet hides the menus, a table breaks across pages), and users save them as PDF files.

Clicking "Print" in a test opens the print dialog of the operating system, which the test can't use.

A Solution​

Ask the browser for the PDF. WebDriver has a "Print Page" command that prints the current page and returns the PDF, without the dialog. The test can set the orientation, the page size, the margins, the scale, and which pages to print, and then check the PDF or save it.

  • Selenium and Selenide: print_page / print / printPage, with print options. The result is the PDF in base64.
  • Playwright: page.pdf(), in Chromium (headless, as Playwright Test runs it by default). It can save the file itself.
  • WebdriverIO: browser.savePDF() saves the file and returns the PDF.
  • Vibium: page.pdf(), with the default settings (it has no print options yet).

The examples check that the result is a PDF: every PDF file starts with %PDF-. To check its content (the text, the number of pages), read it with a PDF library of your language.

Example​

The examples print the tables page of the-internet in landscape (portrait in Vibium), check that the result is a PDF, and save it in a temporary folder, as tables.pdf. They print where they saved it, so you can open it.

Expected Behavior​

  • The browser starts and loads the page
  • The test prints the page to a PDF, in landscape, without the print dialog
  • The test checks that the result starts with %PDF-, and saves it as tables.pdf
  • The browser closes

Summary​

Printing to PDF from the test checks the print version of a page, and keeps a copy of what the user would get. Set the print options the users would pick, and keep the PDF as an artifact of the test run when it's useful.

Happy Testing!

Authors​

Diego Molina
Diego Molina
Elemental Selenium maintainer