1386573 - PDF.js prints documents rendered as plain images

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1774631

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[NtH]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Build ID: 20170628075643

Steps to reproduce:

- Create a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 amd64 VM
- Compile and install a patched cups-pdf that supports printing PDF files with text https://github.com/alexivkin/CUPS-PDF-to-PDF
- Download Firefox 56.0a1-2017-07-31, start a new profile
- Open a PDF file with text in it (e.g. http://www.pdf995.com/samples/pdf.pdf) using PDF.js
- Use the cups-pdf printer to print the document

Also tested with Firefox 55.0b13 and 52.2.1esr, all downloaded from the Mozilla FTP repos.


Actual results:

The final printed document is rendered completely as one image per page.

The printing process makes some kind of preprocessing before cups-pdf, which can take very long for big files. I assume that this is the step where the flattening happens.




Expected results:

Text in printed documents remains as such. Firefox shouldn't flatten the PDF.

Every other program I tested on the same machine didn't have this behaviour. In particular, Evince and Chromium produce "correct" printed PDFs with nearly no processing time.

Comment 1

[YF (Yang)]

Also happened when Nightly 57 + Win10 with Microsoft Print to PDF in pdf.js.

Comment 2

[NtH]

Similar issues at GitHub

PDF is printed as image
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/8075

Retain vectors and the fonts when rendering
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/6718

> There is an open project for an SVG back-end (https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/projects/2) that would allow us to print vectors instead of images, but it's still a work in progress.

SVG backend kanban
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/projects/2

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/tree/master/examples/svgviewer