Printing - Printing from a web browser

Question

The pattern on my form, printed out from my web browser, doesn't appear to get recognized by my pen - pen beeps a lot when writing on it and no data on the pen afterwards.

Answer

Firstly, we always try to guide our customers towards using an Adobe Reader to view & print their (patterned) documents, as this is the intended use when it comes to being able to print out our dot pattern clearly & correctly - this will result in a great user experience every time!

However, we can appreciate that some use cases may require a printout of a (patterned) document via a web browser but this is something we don't actively support, at this point in time.

At the time of writing this article, the only browser that is able to successfully view and print our Anoto dot pattern is Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). When viewing the PDF in the IE11 browser and then zooming in a lot, will show the perfectly round & black dots of our dot pattern.

However, when repeating this on Chromium-based browsers and/or Mozilla then a couple of things become apparent...

1. You're not able to zoom in as much
2. The pattern being printed out on paper is rectangular/triangular shapes, with different shades of black/grey (with some dots being missing all-together?!)

This will unfortunately result in 'broken' pattern, which in turn will send your pen into a beeping frenzy (decoding failures), when trying to write on it.

The cause of this issue is regarding the rendering engines used by the different web browsers:

• IE11 (MSHTML)
• Chromium-based (Blink)
• Mozilla (Gecko)

The main reason for this article now, is that IE11 is becoming unsupported in June 2022! So if you MUST print from a (non-IE) web browser, then we only have 1 possible workaround for now - please see below for Chrome & Edge.

• Chrome

  • Install the IE Tab extension

    

  • After the PDF has been opened in the browser, select the IE Tab-extension icon & this will open the PDF again in an IE-based tab
  • Successfully print
• Edge
  • Open up the PDF in the browser

  • Right-click on tab, selecting "Reload tab in Internet Explorer mode" & successfully print