Please note that we are currently experiencing problems with our release pipeline. This is delaying fixes.
There are a couple of ways you can print.
- You can print the active document, by icon or context menu.
- You can print a selection from the active document, by icon or context menu.
- You can print one or more filse directly from the file explorer panel, by context menu on a folder, file or multi-selection of files.
- Files can be titled with their filepath. The title does not appear in the document but may be used in headers by some browsers.
- You can choose from the following formats.
- No path
- Abbreviated (like
D:\...\containing-folder\file.ext) - Workspace relative
- You can choose from the following formats.
- Files can have their filepath appear as a heading at the start of the document.
- A setting determines whether to use relative or absolute file paths.
- Non-workspace files always use absolute.
- Absolute paths are converted to tilde paths when they are inside the user's home directory.
- A setting determines whether a file path heading appears at the start of individually printed files.
- Exclusion lists apply to both folder and file selections. The purpose of these is to ignore unprintable binary files.
Markdown documents can be rendered and styled. This is detailed in the Markdown section.
To print the active document just click the printer icon to the right of the document tabs. Make sure you don't have multiple lines of text selected. Otherwise, you'll print the selection, not the whole document. Control for paper size, margins and page orientation is in the print dialog.
Select a multi-line block of text in the active document. Then either click the printer icon to the right of the document tabs or right-click on the selection and choose Print from the context menu. When the context menu appears, Print appears at (or near) the top, the bottom or nowhere depending on the setting Print: Editor Context Menu Item Position .
Line numbers in your printout are aligned with the line numbers in the editor whether these are visible or not. So if you are discussing a line of code numbered 1145 in a code review and you open the file to amend it, typing Ctrl+G and then 1145 [Enter] will put your cursor directly on the line of code in question.
To print a file other than the active document, find it in the EXPLORER pane and right-click on it. In the file context menu Print always appears at or near the top of the menu. This prints the entire file.
If you press F1 and type print folder you will find that you can print all the printable files in the folder that contains the active document. A single print job is created with all the files separated by headings showing their names.
Most of these settings customise the user experience (icon, menu location etc). To find these settings, open VS Code's settings pane and either navigate to Extensions/Printing or just search for "printing".
Here is a list of available setting names as they appear in the configuration file.
print.alternateBrowser: enable/disable an alternate browserprint.browserPath: the path to a web browserprint.colourScheme: the stylesheet used for colouring syntaxprint.editorContextMenuItemPosition: the position ofPrintin the editor context menuprint.editorTitleMenuButtonPrint: show print button in the editor title menuprint.editorTitleMenuButtonPreview: show preview button in the editor title menuprint.fontSize: the font size (options from 6 to 13 pt)print.formatMarkdown: render Markdown as styled HTML when printingprint.lineNumbers: on, off or inherit (from editor)print.lineSpacing: single, line-and-a-half or double spacedprint.folder.include: pattern for files to include. Empty matches everything.print.folder.exclude: patterns to excludeprint.folder.maxFiles: the maximum number of files for which content is rendered when printing a folderprint.folder.maxLines: files containing more lines than this threshold will be ignoredprint.logLevel: controls the level of detail going into the log fileprint.filepathAsDocumentHeading: controls use of the file path as a heading at the start of a documentprint.filepathAsDocumentTitle: controls use of the file path as a document title (used by some browsers in the page header)print.filepathHeadingForIndividuallyPrintedDocuments: controls whether the file path header appears at the start of individually printed documents
You can control whether the print icon appears in the toolbar when you focus an editor pane. This setting is labelled Editor Title Menu Button.
You can control whether the "Print" menu item appears at the top, bottom or nowhere on context menus using the Editor Context Menu Item Position setting.
When the Print and Close setting is checked, printing something will automatically open the browser's Print dialog and then automatically close the browser after you either print or cancel. Turning this off will open the browser with the rendered document ready for inspection. If you then manually open the Print dialog, printing or cancelling it will not close the browser.
At the time of this release, problems with command routing were causing printing from remote workspaces to fall back to using the default printer. Full service will be restored as soon as possible.
By default, printing will use your default browser. However, printing works best with a Chromium derived browser, and it may not be possible or desirable to change your default browser.
To allow you to print using a browser that isn't your default browser, you can specify a path to an alternate browser, and there is also a checkbox to allow you to switch this on and off without losing the path.
These settings are labelled Browser Path and Alternate Browser respectively.
The path to the alternate browser is auto-quoted on Windows, and on Unix based platforms the spaces are escaped. Unfortunately this is incompatible with supplying command-line options.
If you need to supply command-line options, create a batch file (or a bash script file) that specifies the options, and refer to the bash script file in your alternate browser path.
Using the Colour Scheme setting you can specify the colour scheme used for syntax colouring. Choices are limited to light themes because printers use white paper.
If you print the active document and there is a multi-line selection, only the selection is printed.
Typeface is determined by VS Code editor settings. If you see Fira Code on screen, that's what will be printed.
The size of printed text is a Print setting because the size that works best on screen may not be the size that works best on paper.
If you're wondering why we call it a typeface and not a font, it's because a font is a particular typeface in a specific size and treatment. "12pt Times italic" is a font. "Times" is a typeface. It does not help that the Windows Font Picker (which does pick a font, you have to specify typeface, size and treatment) mislabels the typeface as "Font".
You probably want Markdown print-jobs rendered and styled, and this is the default behaviour. If you wish to print Markdown as source code, you can un-check the setting Print: Render Markdown .
For source code printing, stylesheets are bundled and can be chosen by name from a list. Choices are limited to light stylesheets because printer paper is white and printer inks and toners are designed for white paper.
- You can embed a stylesheet link tag directly into the Markdown. This is specific to the document.
- There's a setting called
markdown.styles. This is a list of URLs. Both the built in Markdown preview and Print will honour this list. You can use absolute URLs, workspace relative URLS, or document relative URLs, as shown in the following example.
"markdown.styles": [
"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/katex.min.css",
"path/to/document/relative/custom.css",
"workspace.resource/path/to/stylesheet.css"
]Workspace relative URLs are the best way to share resources between documents. They are in the workspace so they can be source controlled along with the documents, and because the URL is relative to the workspace rather than the document you can organise (and reorganise) documents in folders without breaking the URLs. Note that this applies not only to stylesheets but also to image file resources.
Mapping from Markdown to generated HTML is obvious. Tables become table, th and td elements. Headings are H1 to H9. Paragraphs are P elements, bullets and numbers are ul and ol elements.
Don't forget that you can embed HTML in Markdown, so there's nothing stopping you from using div or span to apply a CSS class to a block or run of Markdown.
The embedded web server binds only to the loopback address and accepts only connections that specify an active print session.
Here are some samples to help you check your configuration.
$$
\begin{alignedat}{2}
10&x+ &3&y = 2 \\
3&x+&13&y = 4
\end{alignedat}
$$
and thus
$$
x = \begin{cases}
a &\text{if } b \\
c &\text{if } d
\end{cases}
$$
To work with remote workspaces a Markdown extension must run on the remote host because that's where the Markdown rendering pipeline runs. Extensions like Print that are designed for use with remote workspaces can be deployed to the remote host with a single click. Most Markdown extensions are capable of working like this but they are not set up for it.
Unfortunately, Markdown extensions are not normally configured for remote use; the designers expected them to run locally.
If your need is urgent, you can patch extensions yourself.
- Find the extensions where they are installed on your workstation in
~/.vscode/extensions(on Windows substitute%userprofile%for~) - Edit the
package.jsonfiles for the Markdown extensions you want to use on remote hosts. Add theextensionKindas a root level attribute. - When you've edited all the Markdown extensions restart VS Code.
- Install the extension on the remote host and patch the extension on the remote host in the same way.
...
"extensionKind": [
"workspace"
],
...Patches like this will be lost at the next update for an extension, so if your patch was successful you may want to submit a PR to the publisher.
Issues have been logged requesting rendered printing of formats other than Markdown. Examples include sheet music from the ABC music markup, and Jupyter Notebooks. To support this without taking on the unmanageable burden of keeping up with every text based document format used with VS Code, we have exposed an API and published an SDK allowing the maintainers to incorporate printing into their preview capability.
As a result, if you would like rendered printing for a particular format for which you already have an extension providing preview, raise an issue with the publisher of that extension. Explain your desire to print and refer them for printing and referring them to
- Start by making sure you can print a web page from your browser.
- The user as which VS Code runs must be able to establish a listening socket.
- Nothing seems to happen — restart VS Code.
- Browser launches but no page loads — check networking permissions.
- Browser shows an error message about not finding a CSS file — you installed from a VSIX that wasn't prepared by us. Get the official package and try again.
If something else is wrong, or you have an improvement idea, we invite you to log an issue on the GitHub repository.
The browser used will affect your experience.
For best printing results, install a Chromium based browser or Firefox. If you don't want to make this your default browser, take advantage of the alternate-browser settings. At the time of this release, problems with command routing were causing printing from remote workspaces to fall back to using the default printer. Full service will be restored as soon as possible.
The following are known to work well.
- Brave
- Chromium
- Chrome
- Edge
- Firefox
- Edge Classic is no longer supported.
- Internet Explorer is not supported.
To use Print with a remote host, you must install it on the remote host.
To get the benefit of a Markdown extension when printing a document from a remote host, the Markdown extension must be built with an extensionKind of workspace and it must be installed to the remote host.
Most such extensions are not built for workspace. They can be trivially fixed by modifying their package.json. Unfortunately this manual patch is likely to be lost whenever the extension is updated, so you should raise an issue with the author of extensions you patch.
At the time of this release, problems with command routing were causing printing from remote workspaces to fall back to using the default printer. Full service will be restored as soon as possible.
You cannot supply command-line options on the alternate browser path. On Windows, we automatically put quotes around your path in case of spaces in file or folder names. On other platforms, spaces are automatically escaped.
Both auto-quoting and escaping of spaces are incompatible with the use of command line options. The solution is to create a batch file (or shell script) that launches the browser with command line options, and supply the path to the batch file (or shell script).
Chrome may retain your printer, paper size and margin selections between print jobs. Some Chrome command line options cause errors to be reported, even though printing succeeds.
Some Chrome plugins interfere with print job styling. While it is possible to suppress plugins with --disable-plugins this doesn't work when there is already a running instance of Chrome. The --incognito switch suppresses plugins when there is a running instance, but has its own problems.
If you still can't get Print to work, raise an issue on the repository. We'll try to help you.
We may ask you to crank up your logging level, reproduce the problem and then send us the log.
Set the logging level with the Print: Log Level setting. This defaults to error (minimal logging) but you can turn it all the way up to debug which is very detailed, or even silly which will even log calls to the garbage collector.