[webkit-dev] Duplicate page: Implementing Print Preview

[David Hyatt]

On May 28, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Marc-Antoine Ruel wrote:

> To clarify Sverrir and my intent;
>
> PDF (or EMF as it's currently done on the windows port of Chromium)  
> snapshot is fine for a static print preview but useless for a  
> dynamic one. We'd prefer to have something interactive. If a user  
> changes the layout or the page setup, the print preview is  
> immediately updated. To do that, we need to make the print preview  
> application modal (because of javascript interactions) and I think  
> it defeats the purpose of tabbed browsing.
>
> (Please correct me if I'm mistaken)
> The goal is to make the print preview in its own tab and not modal  
> anymore. So the idea is to duplicate the Document/Frame along with  
> RenderView and all their children into a new WebView, disable their  
> javascript, timers and url request ability. This copy would be used  
> to regenerate the print preview/printed document.
>
> That's quite a daunting task, we'd like to know if we missed  
> something obvious (or already existing!) and if not, if anyone else  
> would like to see the same feature.
>

I don't think you actually have to clone the render tree explicitly.    
You could use DOM operations to clone the DOM and let new renderers  
get constructed by that process.

dave