223004 - Print defaults always to landscape mode - print_orientation is 1

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[jeff givens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Printing always comes up in Landscape mode no matter the setting of the printer properties from control panel. Moz remembers this when changed to protrait but when closed and restartedd revrts back to landscape.

Landscape and portrait printing work just fine - the problem is the default mode changes to landscape for some reason. Only in Moz, no other programs exhibit this behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Alan Batie]

This has been happening to me too, for some time, still in 1.7b

Comment 2

[matthew johnson]

I am having the same bug as described, exactly, user belives it started after
manually selecting Landscape to print a document, now defaults back to landscape
apon reboot
(In reply to comment #1)
> This has been happening to me too, for some time, still in 1.7b

Comment 3

[WD]

Same with Firefox 1.0

After printing once in Landscape mode, it's now always the default.

Comment 4

[WD]

As a workaround:
Go to about:config

Set print.printer_[printer].print_orientation to '0'
Restart mozilla

The default will now be portrait

Comment 5

[Bill Samuel]

My experience is that it *sometimes* defaults to landscape, according to no
pattern that I have been able to discern.  It has nothing to do with the
settings.  After I experience something printing from Firefox in landscape, I
check my Page Setup and Printer settings and find they are both set to portrait.
 If I then print the page a second time, it invariably prints correctly in
portrait the second time.

I did not notice this problem until after I deliberately printed something in
landscape.  Since then, from time to time, it reverts to landscape even though
everything is set for portrait mode.

Bill Samuel, [e-mail]

Comment 6

[bjustjones]

I just came across this bug on my father's computer.
Still around in 2014!
Came across solution in comments from 2009 here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=665493

Comment 7

[Daniel B]

It's still around in 2017! Amazing.

Printed once in Firefox with landscape. Now Firefox ALWAYS defaults to landscape, even though the Printer default is Portrait AND even though about:config reveals that every single setting related to orientation is correct for Portrait.

Comment 8

[webby]

2019 and this is still a problem. Firefox just refuses to follow Windows default printer settings nor apparently correctly update the windows printer settings from within Firefox. No amount of changing settings in about:config ever corrects the problem.

Will this EVER be resolved?

Comment 9

[bigfoot780]

I've encountered this issue in the last few weeks. Its a Samsung Printer. I've changed the orientation to potrait in print prevew to see if that improves things. Print to PDF and then print for real is a workaround.

Comment 10

[webby]

I have a couple of printers and print to PDF often. Firefox ignores all output device settings when it comes to printer preferences so your option doesn't work for me.

I did find a workaround myself which was to manually edit prefs.js which is located in the firefox profile directory and deleting ALL the "print.printer*" entries and then setting the "print.save_print_settings" entry to 'false' (presumably this could be done via about:config as well).

This then forces firefox to use the system printer preferences and doesn't override them in the prefs.js file. So far it seems to be 'sticky'.

Comment 12

[Alexander von Drach]

This still happened in 83.0, when printing pdf.
Printer orientation was always set to landscape for all printers, I had to change it manually for every single print (which is easy to forget, because orientation is not shown in the print dialog).

However, when printing a web page, and changing printer orientation pack to portrait in the print preview, then closing the print preview (without actually printing), changed all printers back to portrait when printing pdf.

So apparently Firefox uses the orientation setting from the print preview for all printers even if print preview is not used (i.e. printing pdf), but does not change this setting.

Imho either printing pdf should use the windows default setting, or the setting from the print preview should be changed if printer orientation was changed during pdf printing.
Or at least printer orientation should be shown in the print dialog.

Comment 13

[kzs985]

Thank you for the workaround! This behavior was wasting me ink and paper all time...

Comment 14

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Can anyone still reproduce this? (specifically, Firefox defaulting to landscape mode, even after you've printed in portrait mode, forcing you to manually select portrait for every single print)

For folks who can reproduce it, could you also see if you can reproduce in a fresh Firefox profile? (Visit about:profiles, click "Create a new profile" and then "Launch profile in new browser" once you've clicked through those prompts. Note that the newly-created profile automatically becomes your default Firefox profile, so you'll need to click "Set as default profile" on your original profile so that things will still open in your regular/preexisting Firefox profile going forward.)

Comment 15

[Khue]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] (mostly-away until Aug 19) from comment #14)

Can anyone still reproduce this? (specifically, Firefox defaulting to landscape mode, even after you've printed in portrait mode, forcing you to manually select portrait for every single print)

For folks who can reproduce it, could you also see if you can reproduce in a fresh Firefox profile? (Visit about:profiles, click "Create a new profile" and then "Launch profile in new browser" once you've clicked through those prompts. Note that the newly-created profile automatically becomes your default Firefox profile, so you'll need to click "Set as default profile" on your original profile so that things will still open in your regular/preexisting Firefox profile going forward.)

I can confirm creating a new profile and printing from there does not fix the issue. It's still printing in the wrong orientation unless I manually change it in "Print using the system dialog…" every time. I tried Chrome and it does not have this issue.

Comment 16

[Khue]

Okay I finally found the settings that work as a permanent fix so I don't have to change the orientation every time using system dialog

*Note I am trying to print 2x1 labels not 8.5x11 papers

• Force print using system dialog only: print.prefer_system_dialog = true
• Force print label in landscape (set as 0 for portrait): print.printer_ZDesigner_ZD421-203dpi_ZPL.print_orientation = 1
• Optional Force print PDF centered: layout.css.page-size.enabled = false

Comment 17

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Thanks for the info -- I think really you are probably hitting bug 1836028, which is specific to 2x1 labels (and more generally paper that's "natively" wider-than-it-is-tall). That bug is on my list to circle back to and close out.

This bug report here, filed 23 years ago with no reports of affected users for many years[1], is unlikely to still be relevant at this point; the printing code has gone through many revisions over 23 years (with a major rewrite over the past 4 years), so it's quite unlikely that the original 23-year-old bug is still reproducible at this point. Any seemingly-related issues that folks hit these days are much more likely to be new bugs, and they deserve their own bug reports and investigations (like bug 1836028). Hence, I'm closing this one as INACTIVE.

[1] (aside from comment 15-16 which as noted are likely to be a different bug)