ScriptX.Services for Cloud

Our cloud service is free and provides for `printing` to a PDF or XPS format file which is downloaded by the user. They may open, save or print the file - think of this as an easy way to provide "download this page as a PDF/XPS document" facility on your website.

For example, click the button at the top right of this page to receive this page as a PDF document.

Leveraging current investments

Supporting customers who have an investment in javascript that works with ScriptX.Add-on for Internet Explorer is very important to us. It will be enough of a challenge to convert HTML content originally authored for IE 7/8 to modern HTML that works in all browsers.

To support customers with current code, we are providing an extensive library that implements an emulation of ScriptX.Add-on in javascript. The emulation will work with both classic '.factory' based code and with  MeadCoScriptXJS based code.

Browser support

Our ScriptX.Services javascript libraries support Internet Explorer 11, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari and any modern evergreen browser that supports HTML 5 and ECMAScript 5 or later.

Modern code

A chance to re-write is always welcome and the very flat properties/methods list of the add-on isn't the design approach that would be taken now.

Our service exposes a rich  Web API for describing the parameters to use on the print and delivering the HTML content to print.

• plain text headers and footers,
• margins,
• landscape or portrait orientation of the paper.
• choosing the paper size to use,
• monitoring of job progress,
• full html headers and footers,
• advanced print scaling.

If you are starting new projects now, then you might want to use your preferred library - jQuery, Angular, React, Vue, Axios etc etc to provide the library for calling a REST API and then extract relevant portions from our libraries on  Github for extracting the HTML to  send to the service [Swagger API Specification].

The choice is yours.

Advantages of ScriptX.Services

 Device and modern browser independence; the host browser and device is not used to to print, print occurs at a server.

 There is no requirement to install code on each users PC (although note we have a for Windows PC version of ScriptX.Services which does require installing code on each PC).

 There is no requirement for the browser user to accept and install a license - license validation occurs at the server.

Disadvantages

 The content to be printed is sent over the Internet when using our cloud based service - this could be a cause for concern with confidential information.

To be clear; the html as displayed on screen sent (securely over https:) to the server along with references to required external resources such as style sheets and images (script references are not sent). The html document is then re-assembled by the server, paginated and rendered.

 This is why we have developed an On-Premise version of the server.

With an on-premise server, any printer available to the server can be used. We gain the advantage of being abe to print from any device with any browser; PC, laptop, tablet even phone but this is a significant difference from the Internet Explorer add-on.

 The Cloud service cannot be used to print content that itself depends on content such as style sheets and images that is hosted behind firewalls or on servers that are addressable locally only.

 We also offer a for Windows PC configuration of the system.

ScriptX.Services for Windows PC enables any browser to be used to print to any printer available to the PC. This is close match to the facilities provided by the Internet Explorer Add-on but for any browser!

 We are unable to intercept the browser menu UI for printing. So, menu options for printing cannot be redirected to use ScriptX.Services. However, Ctrl-P can be interceptd and the browser window.print() method can be overloaded in the usual way with javascript.

 At this time we are using the Internet Explorer 11 Trident Rendering engine in 'edge' mode. This is a highly capabable mode with a high degree of compatibility with modern standards HTML as might be required to be printed but clearly there will be some content that cannot be printed or will appear incorrect if it is not supported by Internet Explorer 11 in standards mode.