3

I've recently started embedding Tableau visualizations on websites and come across an issue with printing them with a straight Control + P in the browser. Most come out completely distorted, if at all. I did some digging and found that this is a known issue:

The Tableau community manager in the above forum posts noted that a static image that shifts to the visualization upon mouse rollover could be an option, but that still wouldn't solve the printing issues if the user did that action to noodle around with the chart, then printed the page.

I also noted the export feature in the toolbar at the bottom of the embed, but I fear this may be too obscure or non-obvious for most users.

Have any folks in the Stack Overflow community discovered a non-clunky way of handling this issue? Sage advice would be greatly appreciated.

Mike Zavarello
  • 3,514
  • 4
  • 29
  • 43

3 Answers3

2

One tip that might be useful for this (or other situations) is that you can tell Tableau Server to return a static PNG image or PDF file instead of dynamic visualization.

If you don't need interactivity, the PNG is nice because it is usually faster. Its still dynamically generated on the server, just delivered as a static image. So if you want a Tableau generated chart for display only on a frequently used web page, then you might want to consider the PNG option.

To do this, just put the string .pdf before the ? mark in the URL, such as http://www.mytableauserver.com/this/that/myFancyView.png?:someOption=Y&:someOtherOption=N

You can also ask for a PDF file this way by specifying .pdf instead of .png as the format.

This may or may not help your printing issue, but I'd expect that PNGs and PDFs tend to print more uniformly across different environments.

Not sure why Tableau wants colons before URL arguments, probably a Ruby developer got carried away.

Alex Blakemore
  • 11,301
  • 2
  • 26
  • 49
  • Thanks for this clever suggestion, Alex. However, I need to be able to deliver the interactive nature of the charts while still accommodating those folks who still like to read printed copies. If you know of any other ways to have it both ways, so to speak, I'd value your insight. – Mike Zavarello Apr 07 '14 at 17:51
1

My solution by JQuery and CSS.

http://en.szewczykmaciej.pl/tableau-printing-visualisation-crtlp-shortcut/

Ajsti.pl - Maciej Szewczyk
  • 163
  • 1
  • 9
0

I don't know how to fix it with Tableau. A work around is to use Javascript library like html2canvas to convert page to image. There are quite a few capture tool in Chrome Web Store.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search-extensions/screen%20capture?hl=en

Screen capture tool doesn't work in complex cases (svg, canvas). My team builds a stand-alone image generation service to address some problems with screen capture.

http://image.vida.io/

Phuoc Do
  • 1,344
  • 10
  • 14
  • Thanks for your response. This is helpful for Chrome users, but that only accounts for about 20% of our total website audience, not to mention the poor souls still using older IE variants (8 and earlier). – Mike Zavarello Apr 07 '14 at 17:53