1711659 - The content in print preview is very small and the scale settings does not work

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Attachment: pdf sample and scale.mp4

Affected versions

• Firefox 89.0b13
• Firefox 90.0a1

Affected platforms

• Ubuntu 20.04
• macOS 11.3.1
• Windows 10

Steps to reproduce

1. Launch Firefox
2. Access this pdf sample
3. Select print
4. Change the Scale value

Expected result

• The page is stretched and easily visible and the scale settings changes for each entered value

Actual result

• The content is very small and the scale settings does not work.

Regression range

• Seems to be a regression, a good build is from 2020-12-20, will see for an exact regression.

Additional notes

• The issue can be seen in the attachment
• This happens with old ui and new ui

Comment 1

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez [:emilio]]

The video doesn't seem to be playable fwiw.

Comment 2

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

I did a recording on macOS too and uploaded it on gdrive. Here's the attachment.

Comment 3

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Mozregression pointed the regression between 2021-04-02 and 2021-04-03 with the following bug being the culprit:
Bug 1702796 - Update pdf.js to version 2.8.320
Pushlog: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=f0995e7b318af33c677fe0c0cae6616a6d8dfb3d&tochange=6754c6b70539e3cb7313cb5412f049a6e35a3aba

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Brendan, Calixte, do you have an idea what could be the cause? Maybe https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/pull/13145?

Comment 5

[Calixte Denizet (:calixte)]

When the scale factor is between 1 and 63, the factor is applied and we can see the effect on the print preview (even if it isn't super fast).
After 63 the scaling is kind of blocked because of (or thanks to):
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/pull/13145/files#diff-d1047e1376717fbe7c554bb385cd48b2dcbbb135e02884be3db97ad072ba741eR1776-R1777
and I guess it's to avoid some overflows.
About The content in print preview is very small: it's just a preview so I don't really know what we can do.
Anyway I compared with chrome preview and the size is almost the same but the fonts look a way better.

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I just noticed that this bug (the PDF print-scaling failure discussed here) effectively breaks our workaround for bug 1693989 -- the workaround that I discussed at the end of bug 1693989 comment 8, regarding testcase 1 there.

(context: bug 1693989 is about the fact that, if you have a PDF that places some content very close to the edge of the paper, and you try to print it to a physical printer, then the close-to-the-edges content will be missing/clipped due the printer's inability to draw to that region. For a short period of time, Nightly users could work around that by e.g. reducing scale to 90% (for example) in the Firefox print dialog. But as of the PDF.js update in bug 1702796 [the regressor here], that doesn't work anymore, unless they choose a very small scale like e.g. 60%.)

Hence: I'm setting this bug as a blocker for bug 1693989; we need to fix this bug as a prereq to fixing bug 1693989, I think.

Comment 8

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez [:emilio]]

Can you elaborate? Using custom margins works in the test-case for bug 1693989 for example.

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

Any updates?
https://superuser.com/questions/1924980/firefox-will-not-scale-up-pdf-to-fill-print-page

Comment 10

[41chemist]

I've seen people reporting this bug as far back as 7 years ago. What needs to happen to get this worked on? I'm willing to give information, logs, videos, and bug testing from both Linux and Windows systems. Sadly, I don't have the programming skills to read the source code or fix it myself. This is an issue across multiple machines I use on a daily basis and I'd like to do whatever is needed to get it fixed.

Comment 11

[zaneszoo]

I am surprised and disappointed that PDF printing from FF has not been solved yet.

I am not a programmer so I can't foresee the technical issues, but since PDF are supposed to be a universal WYSIWYG format, I find it hard to believe that this issue is not an easier fix and/or that Mozilla hasn't put some effort into it--for seven years. On the surface, it just seems like this would be a basic thing that should "just work".

For my current file, it is a google Sheets, one page, simple spreadsheet. For some reason, Sheets creates a PDF rather than sending the sheet directly to the printer. That PDF looks correct and almost fills the page with about .25" margins, as designed. Then, when FF tries to print the PDF, the preview and hardcopy have shrunk the sheet on the page leaving much larger margins all around (I might have it set in Sheets to be centered horz+vert if that setting is even avail in Sheets (I don't remember)).

I tried the about:config settings of Scaling=1 and Shrink-to-Fit=True but it did not change anything.

I wonder if the fix will ever created. I hope so.