1688337 - Thunderbird hangs when printing from built-in PDF viewer

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Greg Lutz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.16; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0

Steps to reproduce:

[Thunderbird 85.0b3 running under MacOs ver. 11.1]
Opened a message with a .pdf attachment
Double-clicked on the attachment name to open it in a Thunderbird tab
Entered Cmd-P to summon print dialog
Typed Enter key to print with all default settings

Actual results:

The Mac rotating beach ball icon appeared and didn't disappear until I quit Thunderbird (the dock-icon context menu included only "Force Quit", not "Quit").

In another example, where the .pdf attachment was short and simple, the problem did not occur, i.e., the attachment printed as expected.

Expected results:

The attachment should have printed.

Comment 1

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Using 85.0b3 on Fedora 33 Workstation.
Double clicked to open a message with a .pdf attachment in a new tab.
Single clicked to open the attachment in the built-in PDF Viewer tab.
Selected the Print icon in the tab.
Selected my printer in the Print dialog.
Selected to print the first page only because my printer jams after printing one sheet.
Pressed Enter and that page printed without a problem.

Test #2 with Ctrl+P and pressing Enter also worked for me.

Your problem is with multiple pages?

Comment 2

[Greg Lutz]

Certainly could be. I'll try a few PDFs of different lengths and see if that's the key. Will report the results tomorrow.

Comment 3

[Eckard Berberich]

Running macOS 10.14.6 I can confirm this issue in TB 85.0b3.
In my test I opened a big PDF attachment (92 pages) in a new tab. As soon as I tried to print it I got the rotating beach ball, Thunderbird froze (was unresponsive) and I had to force-quit the application.
Nevertheless smaller PDF attachments can be printed easily.

Comment 4

[Greg Lutz]

I can report the same results (printing hangs on big PDF attachments, not on small ones).

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

still see this with beta 88

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)

still see this with beta 88?

That was meant as a question.

Related to any of the bugs mentioned in Bug 1688437 comment 2

Comment 7

[Greg Lutz]

Well, today I tried printing some PDFs from the built-in viewer on 88.0b2. A 163-page PDF worked just fine!

(hung) However, when I tried a 1928-pager (https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/SAM_D5xE5x_Family_Data_Sheet_DS60001507F.pdf) it hung just as in my original tests.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Hangs permanently?
High CPU? Or zero?

Comment 9

[Greg Lutz]

Yes, hangs permanently, low CPU usage (0.3%-2.0%).

Comment 10

[Greg Lutz]

More info yet: I tried to print a small PDF (1 page, about 65k in size) attached to an email today, and it hung just as in other experiments with larger PDFs. However, I tried again and noticed that, with the print dialog open, Thunderbird was using around 20% CPU. After a couple minutes, that dropped down to 2%, and I tried hitting the Go button in the print dialog then. It printed! But, perhaps significantly, it printed a blank page. And this was repeatable. I also tried the whole experiment again, requesting the print while Thunderbird was using a significant amount of CPU. Again it hung. And it's really hung, at least, no change after 10 minutes. Also, printing it from Preview worked just fine, not producing a blank page.

The PDF file in question has some slightly personal stuff on it, but I'd be happy to let you have it if it helps.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Craig, can you reproduce this on linux? (or Mac if you have it).

FWIW, Bug 1688437 - Clicking print on the PDF viewer doesn't work on Thunderbird - was recently closed.

Comment 12

[Peter Halverson]

I have the same problem Thunderbird hanging, then after a few more attempts, not hanging but the resulting pdf is, according to Preview, "damaged". (I am printing to a pdf file.)

MocOS 10.13.6
Thunderbird 78.12.0 (64-bit)
Preview 10.0 (944.5)

Low cpu usage when hung.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does it also hang with version 91? Printing is substantially changed in 91

Comment 14

[Greg Lutz]

Can no longer recreate the bug on v. 92.0b4! When trying to print my 1900-page PDF, the print dialog takes a fair amount of time (showing its own busy indicator, not the global beach ball), but eventually actually starts printing. I didn't wait for it to print the whole thing :). In case it's still of interest, I'm now running MacOS 11.5.2 on my 2016 MacBook pro.

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks. Let us know if it gets worse or improves.