219412 - [UX] Consider re-engineering print preview to be PDF-based

Status: NEW

(Core :: Print Preview, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew van Eerde]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: 

Print Preview has a great deal of bugs - not just on Firebird, but in other
popular browsers.  It strikes me that many of these probably rely on the means
of generating a print preview as a sort of poor man's HTML page.  It may be
better to generate them as a rich man's print device.  For example, OS X has the
native Print Preview using an "Adobe Distiller"-like method of "printing" to a
pdf file, and then showing the pdf file in a pdf viewer - perhaps a method of
generating a pdf file can be concocted, or borrowed, for every platform Firebird
runs on.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make a complicated page exhibiting any of the "Print Preview"-style bugs
2. Go to Print Preview
3. Observe the effect of the bug

Actual Results:  
Effect of bug was seen

Expected Results:  
Generate a pdf through a "print-to-file" device, then shown the pdf

Comment 1

[Bob Firth]

Moving to Browser -> Print Preview

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

->default contacts

Comment 3

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Well, bug 369930 makes it possible to generate pdf now. But I'm not sure this bug is something that would make sense in a browser.
I guess an extension could be made of this, at least.

Comment 4

[Cees T.]

http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm

I don't understand what's so hard about resizing the browser's content surface bitmaps, though.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

While it arguably makes sense to generate and display a PDF in print preview (the preview should be as close to what the printer will output as possible and Linux/Mac/CUPS support direct printing of PDF files), it probably doesn't makes sense that the preview be in an external app. We can use our built-in PDF viewer PDF.js to display the PDF if we fix this bug.

Comment 7

[Scott]

So where are we with this issue? There seems to be three of them very similar: 219412, 347417, and 133787. These have all been open for over 15 years!

From my understanding Firefox used to have a built in print preview function on Mac's but then removed it since OSX added their own. However macOS no longer has a built in print preview (except for Apple's own apps) so wouldn't it make sense for Firefox to re-enable their own print preview function again?

I have tried tons of "print preview" add-ons for Firefox and they all seem to be built off the same framework which doesn't work all the time. Before printing I always invoke the preview to I can ensure text/page elements all fit on the page correctly and often times it's best to shrink the scaling % to fit better. For example, that one line that always seems to get put on page two, but changing to 90% and then everything fits on page just fine. Even when I get the preview looking right and hit print, I'm then presented with different options (auto shrink page width, print background images, paper orientation, etc) and these settings seem to be a gamble since they never seem to match what I just saw in the preview. One common problem I have is looking at the preview which is in portrait, but when actually printing it comes out in landscape. Or trying to match up the scaling % in both places. It's kind of like having two volume controls on a Bluetooth speaker....do you set one to 100% and then adjust as necessary with the other, or mix the two controls until you get what you want? What's worse is you'll never know until you actually print it out to see if it worked. Most of the time this leads me to printing 5 or 6 times or exporting as a PDF and THEN printing just to get it to come out right.

Rather then having this headache any longer, why not build in a print preview into Firefox so that the printing process is one step like it is in other browsers? I click print, I get a preview window, adjust if needed and then confirm the print and be done. This is lot more straightforward then having to use a 3rd party preview system that frequently does not match Firefox's print settings which results in incorrect print jobs and wasted ink and paper.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

The current reworking of the printing experience will be tracked under bug 133787, I believe. There are no plans currently to make print preview PDF-based like Chrome. That may be considered at a later date but the tradeoffs aren't really in favor of doing that.