1702147 - Default "Save to PDF" printer paper size doesn't match default printer paper size (creates Letter sized instead of A4)

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Printing, defect, P3)

Description

[oneofthedamons]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0

Steps to reproduce:

Select "Save to PDF" from new Print dialog

Actual results:

Page size changes from A4 (210 x 297 mm) to Letter (8.5 x 11 inches)

Expected results:

Page size should remain A4 (210 x 297 mm)

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Printing: Output' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Can you attach your about:support information? Thanks!

Comment 3

[oneofthedamons]

Attachment: about:support on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:87.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/87.0

I've replicated this on a Windows machine running version 87.0.

Comment 4

[oneofthedamons]

I've replicated this on my work Windows machine running version 87.0. The attached about:support is from that machine.

I'll post the about:support from my home Mac tonight.

To clarify the bug, this is just the default settings of the PDF writer. The user can change Letter to A4 and this seems to stick. The bug I am reporting is that it defaults to Letter, even when everything else in the system Print defaults to A4.

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to oneofthedamons from comment #4)

To clarify the bug, this is just the default settings of the PDF writer. The user can change Letter to A4 and this seems to stick. The bug I am reporting is that it defaults to Letter, even when everything else in the system Print defaults to A4.

Ah, I see, that's a super helpful clarification. The PDF printer settings are controlled by the front-end code.

Curious, if you save to pdf but using the "Print using the system dialog" button, does it work? I think it should, looking at this code.

Comment 6

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

Be aware that Windows before version 10 doesn't have a system PDF printer.

Some web page assume they will be printed in a specific format and switching them breaks the layout, e.g. Germany's online tax reporting has a view for printing/saving before online submission and additional vertical lines pop up if the page format switches to US letter format.

Comment 7

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Apparently there are other people complaining about A4/Letter on SUMO:

I thought we had solved some of these?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1346445

Comment 8

[Mark Striemer [:mstriemer]]

It looks like we might want to try the default printer settings first rather than defaulting to an empty set of options [1]

[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/489e82dcc1e5afbe691ff3b1c982382914637e38/toolkit/components/printing/content/print.js#1186-1192