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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Any advice for PWA developers who are trying to make use of possibly attached hardware? I'm looking to build a POS app that needs to connect to a receipt printer and scanner, but having trouble finding support for the printer bit. Trying to avoid any pop-up dialogue that requires user confirmation.

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You may need to look at some sort of hybrid configuration. A daemon to communicate with hardware, but the user experience built within the PWA.

We use bluetooth thermal printer for a few of our out of internet travelling salesman.

Main problem is almost every other bluetooth printer type/brand need a little print layout adjustment.

If internet connection isn't an issue, you can try papercut.com or google cloud print or setup you own IPP and connect to normal printer. There are also savapage.org but papercut already work for us so haven't try that one.

.pdfp extension adobe acrobat configured to auto print pdfp extension

I don't think there is any free/open option to scan from scanner.

The other option is to use puppeteer to print directly.

Let me know, if you figure it out.

If you don't need iOS, WebUSB should do the trick.

Keep in mind that WebUSB is exclusive to Chromium-based browsers — it won’t work on Firefox or Safari, and given how Google disregarded Mozilla’s and Apple’s feedback on the spec that’s unlikely to change.

https://caniuse.com/?search=WebUSB

What was apple/mozilla’s feedback?

Roughly, that they had privacy and security concerns with the way Google wanted to implement it, if I recall correctly.

Cool - will check it out - want to make sure it will allow printing without any user prompting.

Join our discord and there are likely some people who can help https://discord.gg/tFquNjuK

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