1779854 - Low quality/dithered fonts when printing PDFs within Firefox macOS only

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1772225

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Justin Bull]

Attachment: A scan of the same PDF document printed by different applications and operating systems

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0

Steps to reproduce:

Printed this test PDF via Firefox's "Print..." menu item/dialog which was produced in Google Docs: https://www.justinbull.ca/private/Test%20Print%20Quality.pdf

I also printed the PDF via macOS' native Preview app, macOS Chrome, and Windows 10 Firefox (same version). I also printed other PDFs made by other people.

Actual results:

All the fonts in the PDF printed in a low quality/fuzzy/dithered state when from initiated from macOS Firefox's print dialog menu. This happens with Google Docs PDFs, Office.com PDFs, and random PDFs not authored by myself. See attached scanned results.

Expected results:

All the fonts remain sharp, as if they were vectors, with no fuzzy/dithered edges. Grayscale fonts will still have crisp edges, but will "dither" to approximate gray. See attached scanned results from Windows 10 Firefox, macOS Chrome, and macOS Preview initiated prints.

Comment 1

[Justin Bull]

My printer is a Brother HL-L2390DW B&W laser printer (with latest firmware). I have used both Apple's drivers and Brother's latest drivers (CUPS) I've installed from their website. I have tweaked many print settings and ensured 100% scale. I have printed from both a macOS Catalina (10.15) and macOS Monterey (12). All results are the same when initiated from macOS Firefox.

Comment 2

[Justin Bull]

Attachment: Arial 11pt paragraph PDF comparison.png

Here is a better image showing the impact when printing documents.

While it may appear subtle when viewed as images, I can assure you it's much more apparent when viewing the printed pages in real life.

Comment 3

[Justin Bull]

Attachment: Test Print Quality.pdf

Comment 4

[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 correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 5

[Justin Bull]

Potential duplicate of bug 1269023 however the report of a more pronounced suffering from fuzzy fonts in macOS Firefox is still novel

Comment 6

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jwatt, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 7

[David Shin[:dshin]]

Hm, perhaps this is a dupe of bug 1772225. That fix should be in Firefox 103 and on - are you able to test on a newer version?

Comment 8

[Justin Bull]

:dshin it looks like it is fixed having tested on 103.0.1. Fantastic!