155556 - Complex Pages Print Incorrectly

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Camino Graveyard :: Printing, defect)

Description

[Albert Kammerer]

I am using Mac OS 10.1.5 and Navigator build 2 July. After going through
Mozilla's printing test cases, I found that Navigator has several printing
problems. Fonts usually print larger than on the screen causing pages with
columns to layout poorly on the printout. Also, cell elements like dark boarders
and background colors fail to print.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

Albert, does Chimera print the testcases differently than Mozilla?

Comment 2

[Albert Kammerer]

Yes it does. Mozilla has the same problem printing cell boarders and background
colors, but it lays out the page from a font and graphic perspective almost
perfectly. Columns lay out correctly and the fonts are sized accurately.

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

Albert, I'll try to confirm the problem, but I have no printer. Can you also
reproduce this by just creating print previews? If so, give me an example of one
of those test cases, and what goes wrong with it.

Comment 4

[Albert Kammerer]

You can reproduce the problem with the "Preview" button in the print dialog box.
Go to http://www.mozilla.org and create a print preview of Mozilla's main page.
The columns will be shifted, the fonts will be oversized and cell boarders and
background colors won't appear at all.

Comment 5

[Greg K.]

Confirmed using Chimera/20020708. Chimera fails to make an accurate preview,
while FizzillaCFM/2002070913 succeeds.

Comment 6

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

->conrad

Comment 7

[rods (gone)]

Some of the font issues are probably related to Bug 153080.

But there is the general problem of not being able to get the exact font for the
screen that is used for the printer.

Setting up dependency

Comment 8

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Can someone provide a specific testcase that shows the problem here? I tried a
number of tests described here, and everything works fine.

Comment 9

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

> and background colors won't appear at all

That's because background colors and background images are off by default in the
print options. They probably should default to on which would be more WYSIWYG.
Also, the printing PDE is not included with Chimera. If it was, it would be the
place to put UI (just add some checkboxes) for printing these items or not.

Comment 10

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

BTW - testcase for lack of background color printing is tinderbox.

Comment 11

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Attachment: patch to default to printing BG images and colors

Here's a simple patch until we have the UI to control these options. Printing
www.mozilla.org yields a recognizable page. Tinderbox, though, has some
problems with cells at page boundaries (background doesn't print).

Comment 12

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

I think we should get this patch into 1.0. Non-WYSIWYG printing is really poor,
and the patch is simple and low-risk. Can I get an r=?

Comment 13

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Should we try to get the PDE in? I'm wary of this, because printing pages with
black backgrounds (e.g. arstechnica.com) would suck.

Comment 14

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

The PDE, in it's current state, does not have controls for this.

Also, pages with black backgrounds don't suck unless you have an inkjet printer
which is laying down too much ink. Also, the number of pages which you just
can't read now (white text on colored background) is probably a more common problem.

Comment 15

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Don - Rod said you would know about this: If we're not printing bg colors and,
if a page has a colored background and the text is white, the text prints as
very light grey and is not readable. Apparently, we make some adjustment to the
text color if we're not printing the bg (we change it from white to very light
grey), but it's incorrect. Where is the code which does this? 

Comment 16

[Jesse]

Issues still present in 01/01/03 build. OS 10.1.5.

I have tried three pages, all with significant layout errors.

http://us.imdb.com/
http://baseball.espn.go.com/mlb/index
http://www.macrumors.com/

Also, the new "Shrink to page width" option in the latest build appears to do
just the opposite for me at least on the ESPN page above. For instance, without
it there is a banner at the top which appears on the Preview in full. With
"Shrink..." on, the banner is truncated.

It is worth noting the "Shrink..." option does not seem to make much difference
one way or the other though.

Lastly, changing printer to my particular model (Epson 1200) in "Page Setup"
does not seem to lessen margins as it should....in fact the setting does not
appear to stick once the "Page Setup" dialog is exited. This might be an OS
issue though.

Comment 17

[Jesse]

Note this Bugzilla page itself does not print correctly. Also, the drop down
menu widgets do not display in print preview.

Comment 18

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

> Also, the new "Shrink to page width" option

Chimera behavior is the same as my Linux trunk build of mozilla (broken). See
bug 153080.

> Also, the drop down menu widgets do not display in print preview.

See bug 177953.

> Lastly, changing printer to my particular model (Epson 1200) in "Page Setup"
does not seem to lessen margins as it should

I filed bug 187465 on that.

This bug is too general and discusses problems for which there are already
specific bugs. Closing.

Comment 19

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

v inv.