Hi Michele, We were literally working on setting up a new system for web selfcheck for one of our libraries yesterday. We've been using a combination of different operating systems (sometimes Windows, yesterday Lubuntu for the first time due to RAM limitations on the machine) and a dedicated browser like OpenKiosk (http://openkiosk.mozdevgroup.com/) that's locked down to just the web selfcheck. This was our fourth or so library that we're slowly prototype testing with among our consortium members presently as we work to establish general procedures for deployment.
What I found was that you are correct that printing was often quite fickle. Our major issue yesterday was discovering that we had incorrectly configured our OpenKiosk browser to disable tabbed browsing and weren't allowing any popups to open. This led to a hanging print action that would just put up a progress bar with no finish until the timeout because the background javascript was waiting for a print that never occurred. Basically, the way the page is built required me to allow popups from the site in order to print consistently. The popup page seems to be grabbing content that's generated on the server side using database action/trigger templates to collect and build a page with the content to be printed. Once that page is printed, the popup goes away, and that in turn takes away the print progress bar that's waiting on the initial selfcheck window area. Additionally in our case, without tabbed browsing, the popup actually took the place of the selfcheck page with no return back to the selfcheck, leaving only the templated page contents that were meant to be print on the screen with no back button; hence the need for tabbed browsing. This was the case with our experiences with OpenKiosk so far. Firefox did spit out some quick warnings about popup blocking, which is what caused me to start reading into the source javascript on the page and learning how printing operated. Overall, I'm not entirely sure I like how the javascript operates on these selfcheck pages, though I do not have too much time to commit towards reviewing or writing new solutions at this time. It might be an interesting question for future development interests though. -- Ben On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Michele Morgan <[email protected]> wrote: > We are wondering how many libraries are using the simple self check web > interface built into Evergreen as documented here: > > http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.5/_self_checkout.html > > One of the problems we are having is printing receipts reliably. In > Firefox, receipts print sometimes, but other times they do not print and > leave a progress bar hanging on the screen. > > We have also experimented with running self check in NetKiosk, but have > not been able to print receipts at all there. > > What sort of experiences have others had using the Simple Self Check? > > Any advice or recommendations for getting receipts to print reliably is > welcome. > > -- > Michele Morgan, Technical Assistant > North of Boston Library Exchange, Danvers Massachusetts > [email protected] > -- Benjamin Shum Evergreen Systems Manager Bibliomation, Inc. 24 Wooster Ave. Waterbury, CT 06708 203-577-4070, ext. 113
