Silent Printing

Silent printing is what makes a self-service badge kiosk possible. A web page cannot normally send a job straight to a printer: the browser shows a print dialog every time and waits for someone to press Print. That is a sensible security rule for the rest of the internet and a nuisance for a kiosk with no keyboard. So kiosk systems run the browser in a special kiosk-printing mode, install a small print agent on the computer, or skip the browser altogether with a native app.

Some vendors call it automatic or direct printing. Whichever route a system takes, the printer still has to be connected to the device, by cable or on the same local network, so silent printing never removes the need to test every station the day before.

The eventcloud Badge Kiosk prints silently from a Windows laptop: start Edge, Chrome or Firefox in kiosk mode following the steps on the Badge Kiosk page, and each badge goes straight to the badge printer with no dialog and no print agent to install. Printing from the dashboard still uses the browser's print dialog.