Showing the print preview on slips requires extra clicks and slows down printing

As discussed in RA SIG on 27 June 2022.

After UICIRC-818 SPIKE:

The print modal (i.e. that shows the PDF and where you can select the printer, etc.) is a browser modal, and not a FOLIO modal. This appears because you want to print something from the browser (from FOLIO, or a Google search, or whatever), and appears whenever you press Ctrl+P (on Windows at least). So this modal cannot be hidden away, or skipped. You could try tweaking the browser settings to pre-populate the fields, but this is then outside of FOLIO.

Generally, it is not safe to have the browser send print requests directly, so Brooks’ suggestion “a back-end module that processes print jobs and points to a network printer...” does not come into question here.

His other suggestion “a service running on the local system + a browser extension” points to developing a separate, desktop application, which may need to be very different depending on operating systems. Developing such an application is (currently) outside of the scope of the FOLIO open source development project; alternative solutions may already exist though.

--> I suggest closing as "won't do".

Indeed, as Tom has said: The current solution of having several steps to print staff slips (e.g. for pick slips: Generate the pick slip report > The preview appears, so that the user can select what the destination should be (e.g. printer) > click on print) is because it's not actually FOLIO doing the printing, but the browser.

Can there be a way, when you click the option, to send an order to print the pick slips directly to the (a? which one?) printer? I don't know the answer; I know colleagues in the past have made passing comments about security issues of letting a browser SaaS solution have direct access/connection to hardware. I'd need to get a group of experts together (who?) to discuss what needs to be considered.

Size = Jumbo.