1949200 - Malfunctioning on [ Default Printing > Save as PDF ]

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Logan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:135.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/135.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox default printing > Save as PDF; I've tried to reinstall the Firefox, and reopen it in Troubleshoot Mode, but couldn't help...whether I choose the action as "Open in Firefox" or "Save File"(MacBook Air M1 with the latest version of macOS and Firefox)

Actual results:

The Firefox can only print "Zero Bytes" PDFs for over 2 months.

Expected results:

Normal PDFs should be printed out with contents and should be able to be opened by Preview

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

[Logan]

(In reply to BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte] from comment #1)

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.

Thank you for your kind reply. Would you mind listing some procedures that I should follow to fix it? Thank you

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Comment 1 was just an automated comment from a bot describing its actions as it classified the bug; you can ignore it. :)

Anyway - thanks for the bug report. Not sure what might be going on here, but this sounds a bit like bug 1667509 (though that bug went away ~4 years ago).

Could you do two things:
(1) Visit the special URL about:support, scroll down to "Modified Print Settings", and copy/paste that section into a text file and attach that text file here, using the "Attach new file" button just before your first comment here (in the Attachments section)

(2) Capture and share a Performance Profile of the bug? See https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/reporting_a_performance_problem.html . That page is focusing on performance issues (slowdowns etc) but it sometimes can help surface what's going wrong in a bug like this, too. In this case, after you start recording the performance profile, you'd want to go to a simple page like https://example.org and then print to Firefox's Save-to-PDF print target, and complete the print operation, and then stop recording, and then click the button to "upload local profile".

(You might want to do this with no other tabs open, since the profiler captures activity in background tabs, too.)

Thanks again.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Also, to clarify -- there are a few different ways to save as PDF, and it'd be good to know which way you're talking about (and whether other methods work).

I'm guessing that you're using the macOS System Print Dialog, since you mentioned choosing between "Open in Firefox" vs. "Save File"/"Save as PDF" -- and those are both options in a dropdown near the bottom of the system print dialog. (For me it's "Open in Preview" but that's because Preview is my default PDF-viewer on my mac test machine). Normally you have to click an extra button to get from Firefox's print dialog out to the the system print dialog, but you might arrive there directly if you have about:config preference print.prefer_system_dialog set to true -- you might try visiting about:config and type print.prefer_system_dialog into the search box there, and see if it shows true or false.

If you do see Firefox's own print dialog, it'd be good to check (if you haven't already) whether printing to the Save-to-PDF print target (listed in the "Destination" dropdown at the top) happens to work.

(Also: it's possible that certain content -- e.g. whatever it is you're normally trying to print -- might have something special about it that triggers the breakage, while other content -- e.g. example.org -- prints just fine.)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Hi Logan -- just checking in again since a week has passed -- see my requests in comment 3 and comment 4. Please report back when you're able, and we'll see to-what-extent we can figure out what might be happening here. Thanks!

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Closing as incomplete for the moment; can't proceed without more info here. Please reopen if you're able to share more info (see comment 3 and comment 4). Thanks!