1850442 - Print dialog should open pre-scrolled to the current page for PDF documents

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Printing: Setup, enhancement)

Description

[Justin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0

Steps to reproduce:

• open a PDF (I was looking at a PDF from blob:https://myaccountrwd.allstate.com)
• scroll down to a page other than the very first (I was looking at page 9)
• invoke Print cmd from the PDF toolbar - observe the first page of the PDF is shown in the preview
• change the Changes value to "Current"

Actual results:

The preview does not update to the current page (p. 9), the current page (p. 9) does not print.

Expected results:

The current page being viewed should have been previewed and printed.
(The actual page, not the PDF page #; those can be different.)

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 correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I don't think that's what "Current" is intended to do... it doesn't relate to what was being viewed in the browser window, but to what's currently visible in the preview panel. If you scroll the preview to page 9, and then choose Pages: Current, you should get just that page printed.

Comment 3

[Justin]

Oh my gosh! I see what you mean. That works contrary to any other app. Usually you don't even get a preview, but in the print dlg you select current and you are done.

The preview is a good thing (I think), but let it default to the currently viewed page, if only not to cause this confusion. It even makes sense because that is the user's mindset when print is initiated, like if they want that page they are looking at. Why should I have to re-scroll thru my 98 page document to find the one page I want to print. AND that assumes I remember which page I was on.

Maybe the fact that the preview doesn't start with the current page is a bug?

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

For general web content, the concept of "current page" isn't really meaningful, because it's not paginated (and the print layout might be quite different from the on-screen layout). So "current page" only has meaning within the context of the preview, where print layout has been applied.

But for a PDF, where the pagination is inherent in the document, I agree it would seem desirable for the print preview to open at the same page as is currently being viewed, and then choosing "current page" in the dialog would automatically give you what you're expecting.

I'm not sure offhand how easily this can be implemented, but it seems like it'd be a nice usability enhancement.

I'll update the bug title to reflect this.

Comment 5

[Justin]

So why couldn't the 'current page' of a web page be the portion (or closest paginated) that is being viewed? It seems like a reasonable result.

Thanks for the information and attention, Jonathan.