PDF output does not work because puppeteer fails to launch on Windows

[fmatzy]

My corporate policy prevents chrome to launch without specific extensions. Puppeteer troubleshooting guide provides how to solve this problem:

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  ignoreDefaultArgs: ['--disable-extensions'],
});

Please support to pass this launch option to puppeteer in pdf output procedure.

[yhatt]

It's a clear reason but I wonder if ignoring --disable-extensions will really help you, because Marp makes a new empty profile with no bundled extensions instead using existed profile.

[yhatt]

The updated v0.18.1 has supported CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS environment value to enable Chrome extensions while converting Markdown.

@fmatzy Try running SET CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=1 right before using the latest Marp CLI. We would be greatful if you could report whether PDF conversion has worked.

[yhatt]

We need feedbacks about CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=1 env by users using restricted Chrome managed by organization.

@fmatzy What happened after that?

[fmatzy]

@yhatt
Thank you for adding CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=1 env. Thanks to this env var, the error message Faled to launch the browser process is gone, but a new error Protocol error (IO.Read) is now raised. And I found that when using Puppeteer itself andpage.pdf() directly, I got the same error message Protocol error (IO.Read) too.

I suspect this is a problem with Puppeteer itself and my company's environment. But unfortunately I've moved to another project and am using a PC that is not covered by company policy and on which Puppeteer emits PDF files correctly, so I can't investigate the issue any further.

[yhatt]

Thanks. Probably the managed Chrome by the organization might have been stuck to an incompatible version (Chrome < 77) with the latest Puppeteer. See also: puppeteer/puppeteer#4609

At least it's proved that CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS is useful escape hatch to execute a restricted Chrome, so we are going to keep the environment flag.

[sohwemong]

Same issue happened with the marp-vscode version.
Is there any valid parameter or advice?

Maybe this should be posted on marp-vscode, but since it is the same topic, I thought it would be better to post it here.
I apologize if this is not appropriate.

[yhatt]

Marp for VS Code is using Marp CLI internally. You can try the above workaround by opening VS Code with Marp CLI specific environment value.

# Linux / macOS
CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=1 code

# Windows
SET CHROME_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=1
code

To open VS Code from CLI, you may have to run Shell command: Install 'code' command in PATH in the command palette of VS Code at first.

[sohwemong]

Thank you!
I was only thinking of editing settings.json.
I'm embarrassed...

Incidentally, if want to run VSCode by double-clicking on Windows, adding an environment variable in the GUI will work for sure.
I'd like to add this in case anyone else has the same question.