Visual Studio Code Printing

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English version by Peter Wone

ENGLISH | FRENCH | РУССКИЕ | Add a language

The print icon on the toolbar prints the document in the active editor.

If you have a text selection that crosses at least one line-break you can right click and choose Print from the context menu to send just the selection to the printer. In the absence of a multi-line selection the entire document is printed. You can control the position of Print in this menu, or remove it altogether.

Or you can right-click on a file in the file explorer pane and choose Print from the context menu.

Features

Printing on Mac, Linux and Windows

• Entirely local in operation, no dependence on cloud services
• Syntax colouring in a wide range of familiar colour schemes that you can import or modify
• Optional line numbering
• Adjustable line spacing (1, 1.5, 2)
• Print a selection of code with line numbers matching the editor
• Specify a browser other than your default
• Markdown documents are rendered when you print them (or not, there's a setting)

Requirements

You'll need a web browser and access to a printer.

This extension is tested with Windows 10 with current builds of Chrome, Edge and Firefox. I can't test on a Mac because I don't own one. Likewise I don't have any systems running Windows XP, 7 or 8. If you use an untested combination then report bugs with test documents and snaps of failed outcomes.

Extension Settings

VS Code Printing is highly configurable. Settings can be modified by going to Code > Preferences > Settings > Extensions > Printing.

A detailed breakdown of these settings can be found in the manual.

Known Issues

Making printed tabs respect the editor tab size setting depends on the experimental CSS tab-size property. This doesn't work on Edge Classic.

Chrome remembers too much about printers, paper sizes and margins especially if you abort.

KaTeX requires an internet connection. You must also configure a stylesheet reference. Details are in the manual.

Release Notes

0.8.3

• Updated highlight.js to latest version on advice from the keepers of highlight.js.
  • Removed potential vulnerabilities to HTML documents containing toxic script
  • Addresses minor colourisation issues (see #63)

0.8.2

• Removed port acquisition announcement setting as ports are no longer under user control.
• Corrected issue 68, an exception occurring when printing an editor buffer that does not have a corresponding file on disk, by typing the command.

0.8.1

• Because the host operating system now chooses the port for the embedded webserver, the webserver is created on first use and retained until the extension deactivates, so that the port allocation does not change. Code to decommissione the webserver after processing a request was not removed in 0.8.0 and is removed in 0.8.1 removing the risk of an unexpected change of port.

0.8.0

• Various issues describing high CPU use at extension startup are resolved by use of Webpack.
• Port selection for the embedded webserver is now fully delegated to the host operating system. As a result the port range settings are no longer necessary and have been removed.
• No longer dependent on the portfinder package.

0.7.15

• Issue 64 - local images were broken because Microsoft changed VS Code. Markdown rendering no longer rewrites resource references to prefixed filepaths, they are now passed through unchanged. The extension now handles mapping to the filesystem.

0.7.14

• Issue 51 - add configuration in support of WSL, courtesy of sburlap
• Issue 54 - respect editor font when printing code

0.7.13

• Issue 48 - fix MD image path glitch.
• Update dependencies to address known vulnerabilities.

0.7.12

• Issue 40 - prevent double file extension producing an unhandled exception in the page generator stalling the embedded webserver resulting in an empty white browser window for a page load that does not complete.
• Issue 41 - handle unexpected exceptions in the page generator by delivering the error stack as the page content, thereby vastly improving diagnostic information in issues.

0.7.11

• Issue 39 - correction to inappropriately scoped regular expression causing colons to be escaped in the entire document when they should be escaped only in URLs.

0.7.9

• Issue 36 - corrected a problem with the internal rendering pipeline rewriting URLs to use a vscode internal protocol. This caused image references to work in the preview but fail in the browser.

0.7.8

• Issue 35 - stylesheet cache path incorrectly constructed on non-Windows file systems. This has now been corrected.

0.7.7

• Issue 33 - the editor tab-size setting was incorrectly retrieved and therefore not respected. This has now been corrected.
• Issue 34 - printing was failing for direct invocation (press F1 then type Printing: Print finally press Enter). This has now been corrected.

0.7.6

• Localised to French.
• The Russian "localisation" is a stub (still in English) pending translations.
• Menu and icon availability now determined from editorLangId rather than resourceLangId. This should allow printing of unsaved documents and unrecognised file types per issues 31 and 32.

0.7.1

Now using VS Code's markdown rendering pipeline.

• faster load
• smaller memory footprint
• markdown extensions like Markdown+Math take effect when printing

0.7.0

• Bump minor version as 0.6.13 introduced new settings changing the UX
• Fix support for extended character sets and mixed languages in printed source code (#29) with thanks to Ekgart Vikentiy for reporting this.

0.6.13

Stub release because there's no other way to patch the readme.

0.6.12

• Settings to allow the user to move the range in which the embedded webserver chooses ports
• Moved default port range into the correct range for dynamic ports (was library default)
• Separate manual thanks to Nat Kuhn

0.6.9

• UTF-8 for extended charsets.
• Support images on local paths.

ac WEB DESIGN reported both these issues and provided test content.

0.6.8

• Control whether the embedded web server announces which port it acquires (off by default).
• Render Markdown with the same engine VS Code uses for preview.

0.6.7

Report acquired port to user with toast.

0.6.5

• Context menu position is now a setting.
• New store graphics.

0.6.2

Fixes command categories so they appear as

• Print: Browse for stylesheet
• Print: Print

The commands are present and functional in 0.6.1 but are not correctly categorised.

Colour scheme stylesheets are no longer selected from a combo-box. Instead there is a new command Print: Browse for stylesheet that spawns a file-browse dialog and updates the setting. If you choose a file outside the stylesheet cache it is copied into the cache so you don't become dependent on network-local resources.

Earlier versions occasionally had problems with port collisions causing printing to fail. A manual retry or three always fixed it but this was ugly. Correcting the problem was the primary focus of 0.5.3, and I am pleased to finally remove it from known issues.

Also addressed is [issue #17](https://github.com/PeterWone/vsc-print/issues/17) which moves responsibility for language detection from highlightjs (the library used for syntax colouring) to VS Code, falling back to highlightjs when an incompatible language code is produced.

Microsoft Edge always prompts for permission to close the browser after printing, which can be annoying. Firefox doesn't prompt, it just plain doesn't close the browser, which is beyond annoying. As a result, Chrome is the recommended browser for printing.

0.6.2

Apply categories to commands.

0.6.1

Documentation tweak.

0.6.0

• Colour scheme stylesheet setting is no longer presented as a combo-box. Instead, there is a command that presents a file-browse dialog and updates the setting.
• Language detection falls back to highlightjs when VS Code produces an incompatible language identifier.

0.5.3

• Tab size respects editor setting.
• Responsibility for language detection moved from highlightjs to VS Code.