Printing a Word document from IE without opening print dialog

Question

I have a requirement where I need to print a specific word document when I click on a button in IE8/IE9. I tried to find a way using ExecWB and other methods but could not achieve my goal. Couple of constraints I have are as follows.

1. The word document is availble through URL and this URL is from a different site than the page where I am clicking the button to print (XSS considerations ?)
2. I need to directly print using default printer without popping up the print dialog.

Is this possible in anyway?

Answer 1

Impossible from within the context of HTML page, without a custom browser extension. Word document must open before it's printed (maybe not visually presented to the user upon opening, but MS Word or some other application that is capable of opening word docs must be installed on the client system. There is Office extension for IE, which can be used to open the document, but the user has to click on the print button to invoke the dialog. There's nothing that you can do from within javascript to accomplish that. I'm sure you could, if you wrote your own IE extension/plugin, but unless your users are corporate that must install it, nobody else will.

I hope I'm not lying to you.