2041941 - [macOS] Text gets rasterized and looks fuzzy/blurry in printed documents (and is unselectable in PDFs), if it's in an element with partial transparency from e.g. `opacity: 0.8`

Status: NEW

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:

1. Visit https://example.org/ in Firefox on macOS
2. Print (in my case to a Brother MFC-J6535DW printer).
3. Look at the output.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
The characters in the printed document are fuzzy/blurry.

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Crisp characters.

These browsers gave me "actual results" (blurry text):
Firefox 150.0.3 on macOS Sonoma 14.6.1
Firefox 151.0.1 on macOS Tahoe 26.5

These browsers gave me "expected results" (crisp text):
Firefox 151.0.1 on Ubuntu 24.04
Safari on macOS Sonoma 14.6.1

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: photo of blurry text (left is "expected" from Firefox on Ubuntu; right is "actual" from Firefox on macOS)

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: comparison of Firefox on Linux, Firefox on macOS, Safari on macOS

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

The text is also rasterized (unselectable) if I print to the "Save to PDF" backend and open the resulting PDF. I suspect this is a result of that same issue.

I think I recall there being a bug on that already, so maybe this is a duplicate...

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Yeah, I thought we'd have something like this on file, but I'm not immediately finding it. It does reminds me of bug 1908587, though it's not clear that one was affecting simple HTML content as opposed to more complex canvas-based docs.

Presumably at some point the cairo-quartz backend fails or decides something is unsupported, and so falls back to a rasterization codepath.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

ni=me to track down a regression range

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

OK, so fortunately this isn't a general issue -- there's something special about example.org that triggers this. It's this rule:

div {
	opacity: 0.8;
}

If I uncheck that, then I get expected results.

But using unmodified example.org, I get bad-results going back at least as far as 2021-01-01 (I tested every Jan 1st build between then and now).

I'm using a macBook Pro (with Tahoe 26.5)