IEPrint instructions

2 minute read

Recently, there have been a few links in popular places to my IEPrint add-in for printing from IE6. Given that this was a quick project written in a couple of days about three years ago and mostly for my own benefit, my laziness in not writing proper documentation or building a more intuitive installation page has come back to bite me. What’s more, with my recent work on printing in IE7, I’m on shaky IP ground to go back and make changes.

Rather than continuing to reply individually to everyone that complains that it isn’t working, I thought I’d write up the instructions here again:

The correct download page really is this one. What should happen is that you get a request to install an ActiveX package that contains the add-in. Once this is installed, you are redirected back to the site home page (yeah, yeah, that was lazy). Since this was written before XP SP2, I expect horrible things happen with the information bar at the top of screen. At some point I’ll find time to try this and update the instructions here with more specific SP2 information.

Now, one of two things happens next. Either a new button will appear on the IE toolbar when you next restart the browser, or you will need to manually right click on the toolbar, choose Customize, and add the “Fit-width Print” button to your current selection.

After that, you’re ready to go. Click the button to print or hold the control key on the keyboard down while you click the button to go to print preview. The add-in will use the width of the browser window on screen to control the size on the page. This means if you have lots of white space on the screen, you’ll get lots of whitespace on the page. Alternatively, if you have a horizontal scrollbar on screen because the window isn’t wide enough, you’ll get the whole of the content mapped to the width of the page including everything you can scroll to. For the person that had a massive line of text off to the right, this meant that things got pretty small when printed. Sorry about that.

I should say that the printing support in IE7 is much more intuitive than this but this add-in might get you by until IE7 is released.

Update: If you have are running on XP SP2 then the download page will redirect you to the home page and show the information bar at the top of the screen saying that the page attempted to install an ActiveX control and to click to install it. If you click the bar and choose install, the add-in will then be correctly installed. Close all your IE windows and then start IE and the toolbar button should be there. If not, follow the instructions above.

Update 2: A kind correspondent pointed out that they needed Local Admin rights to install the add-in.

Updated: