Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Printing Guest Logins at Reference Desk

Use IE to print out guest logins at the Reference Desk. For some reason guest accounts sent to the printer from Mozilla come out as gobbledegook.

2 comments:

Stephen Francoeur said...

If you are in Firefox and this printing problem happens, then just add this little extension to Firefox: IE Tab. What it does is force Firefox to load a particular page using Internet Explorer within the Firefox browser window. That way, you can continue to use Firefox as your default browser and have it occasionally call upon Internet Explorer to load those few pages that don't play nicely in Firefox.

Here's how to set up IE Tab:

Go to the IE Tab page from Mozilla and click the green download button.

When you are done downloading IE Tab, you will be prompted to restart Firefox.

When Firefox is restarted, go to the guest login page again.

Once the guest login page is loaded, you need to add the URL for it to a list of pages that will thereafter automatically load using the IE Tab feature. Go to the list of commands at the top of the Firefox browser and select "Tools" and under that "IE Tab Options."

When the IE Tab Options windows opens, you'll see the URL for the guest login system at the bottom next to an "Add" button. Click "Add" to add it to the list of URLs that will load in IE from now on.

Click the "OK" button to close the IE Tab Options window.

Refresh the browser (hit F5 on the keyboard) and the Guest Logins page should now load in Internet Explorer but within the Firefox window.

Frank said...

Another possible issue - after you log in, open Firefox for the first time, and launch the Guest Logins for the first time, you're confronted with some security menu that asks "do you want to trust this site etc etc" If you respond Yes, you'll be ok. If you respond No, or hit Cancel, or just close the window, the guest login page will act weird (or may not work at all). If you've already hit No or Cancel, you'll have to log out and log back into the machine for another opportunity to say Yes.

The IE Tab is a handy tool to have, particularly if you use a non-Windows machine, don't have IE, but need it to get a page to load. Or if you just hate using IE period (it often blocks data downloads from certain sites for "safety" reasons - one of the sites it blocks is the census bureau's american factfinder!)