Friday Fun Add A Print Menu to the PowerShell ISE

I spend a fair amount of time in the PowerShell ISE. One task that I find myself needing, especially lately, is the ability to print a script file. I'm sure you noticed there is no Print menu choice. So I decided to add my own to the ISE.

Printing a file in PowerShell is actually not that difficult: get the text content and send it to Out-Printer.

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
Get-Content myscript.ps1 | Out-Printer
[/cc]

This will send the file to the default printer. In the ISE, you could use a command like this:

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
Get-Content $PSISE.CurrentFile.FullPath | out-printer
[/cc]

One issue I've found with Out-Printer is that the formatting sometimes isn't as nice I'd like; I end up with a variable width font and not a fixed width. Another way, though which always guarantees a fixed width font is to use Notepad. Fortunately, you can print with Notepad right from a command prompt.

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
notepad /p c:\scripts\myscript.ps1
[/cc]

This will print to the default printer using whatever last settings you used for Notepad. I tend to bump the font size. See where I'm going with this?

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
Notepad /p $PSISE.CurrentFile.FullPath
[/cc]

That's really all there is to it, but I hate typing any more than I have to. So I wrote a simple function that I can use in the ISE.

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
Function Print-ISEFile {

Param([string]$path=$PSISE.CurrentFile.FullPath)

Start-Process -filepath Notepad.exe -ArgumentList "/p",$path -WindowStyle Hidden

<# this is an alternative way using the default printer get-content -Path $path | out-printer #>

} #end function
[/cc]

In my final function I decided to use Start-Process to hide as much of the popup windows as I could. Once the function is loaded, I can run the function and it will print the current file. But let's take this one step further and add the function as a menu option to the AddOns menu.

[cc lang="PowerShell"]
$psISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.submenus.Add("Print Script",{Print-ISEFile},"CTRL+ALT+P") | Out-Null
[/cc]

This will add a menu choice called Print Script with a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+P. I dot source the script file in my PowerShell ISE profile and I'm good to go.

Download Print-ISEFile.

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