1876850 - Ability to limit maximum images size / width for pictures in PDF / printing export

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Printing, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Fortin]

Attachment: firefox RFE - image scaling adjustment for Simplified print PDF output mode.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:121.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to this blog post (or this tutorial article)
2. Open the print dialog (Ctrl+P)
3. Choose "Save to PDF" as the "Destination"
4. Choose "Simplified" instead of "Original" in the Format setting

Actual results:

Images are so huge, they make the document consume twice the amount of pages (or more) than you might want, they would increase the resulting PDF's filesize (you might not want super-high-resolution/high-DPI images for some personal archival purposes) and some images are cut-off across multiple pages (which is the venerable bug #146799), and there is no way to adjust this down.

For example, on the article linked above, Firefox's "Simplified" print causes the bees pictures to take 2½ pages by themselves (pages 1 to 4) and the "man's portrait" images take slightly over 1 page... but if the user had a way to set a "maximum width for images", and set it to roughly half the page width, then (presuming aspect ratio is preserved) the contents of this article could have fit in roughly 3-4 pages instead of 7.

In the 2nd example article, the images that are all full-width cause the resulting document to be 12 pages, for what is essentially editorial images that could be perfectly usable at half the width (and therefore height).

Expected results:

For many articles, images are mostly "editorial" or decorative, without necessarily needing full-width high-DPI detail to be preserved when printing or archiving to PDF (especially since a 8.5"-wide piece of paper lets you see an image pretty well even if it were to be 33-50% of the page's width); i.e. the text is more important, and having images that are present but less prominent would be very useful.

I would like to have a slider (or some sort of UI) that allows specifying a percentage of the maximum width (and therefore, height, as per aspect-ratio preservation) images can take on a page, or maybe a general image scaling slider. In many cases, it would allow for shorter output/documents, lighter filesizes, and a more balanced appearance.