1495237 - When switching printers, reset any prepopulated settings from the previous print that are not valid for the new printer

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1658450

(Toolkit :: Printing, defect, P3)

Description

[Len Powell]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180920131237

Steps to reproduce:

Change printer to a thermal printer (Like for UPS or USPS)
Print the thermal label
Change to other printer, standard paper printer


Actual results:

When the thermal printer is selected in Firefox, that paper label setting is now set for any other printer that is chosen. Even if a different printer is selected the thermal label format is shown and it tries to print that format, which is of no use. 


Expected results:

The paper format must match the printer that is selected and not stay with the thermal printer. That would seem to be common sense!

Comment 2

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

This was filed against the dialog based UX, but the new doorhanger UX should be especially careful to do this.

Comment 3

[Mark Striemer [:mstriemer]]

We filed bug 1658450 to refresh the printer settings when it changes. The error I was getting with the Save to PDF option seemed to be that we were copying over settings that we shouldn't copy over (but only after you've used the old print dialog, interestingly).

We'll stop copying the settings over, but we need to figure out what to do with the other settings. If I change settings to my liking then realise I'm printing to the wrong place (and they're reasonably equivalent) I'd rather use my changes than the last used for that printer. Perhaps for now we should just throw all the changes away and refresh just to be safe.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

There may be some hidden settings in the nsIPrintSettings object if you initialized it from a previous printer. I would expect those to be overwritten if you switch to another actual printer, but switching to 'Save to PDF' may not overwrite something significant.

It would seem to make sense to me to behave as follows (possibly modulo optimizations to step 2 and 3 to avoid unnecessary overwriting):

1. create a settings object using the default settings for the newly selected printer
2. overwrite that with any settings that have been saved for that printer
3. overwrite that with any settings set in the UI, but "clamped" to be valid based on any restrictions imposed by the printer (whether it supports the currently selected paper size, duplex, margins, etc.)

Comment 5

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

We'd normally duplicate the newer bug to the older bug, but since bug 1658450 has a patch I'll dup this over to that one in this case. Thanks for the report, Len.

Comment 6

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

(Actually, maybe this one is a real dupe. Apologies for the bugspam!)