226397 - fonts seem rather too large when printing

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Pat Tressel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.5/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.5-sea.tar.gz

When a page containing text is printed, or when a print preview is displayed,
the font sizes are too large.  Text may be clipped at the right margin.

This is on Linux, and happens on versions 1.4b, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6a.  It was fine
on 1.2.  Don't know about 1.3.  Both 1.5 and 1.6a were downloaded on 11/20/03,
so the problem exists in recent builds.

This sounds similar to the Windows bug # 211092.  That problem was fixed.
I was asked to file a separate report for Linux.
There are ancient (pre-1.0) Linux bugs that are similar: # 24405, # 93344.
Other prior bug reports that might be relevant (??): # 106083, # 177805.

The reason I noticed this was that my resume happens to be in html.  When
I tried to print it, each page ran off the end, and the fonts were gross.
I'm now desperately trying to tweak the html so html2ps likes it.  (html2ps
produces the expected font sizes, but doesn't make the same choices as
mozilla about where there should be blank lines...)

-- Pat Tressel


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Display a page with text, with some font sizes specified like:
<font size=-1>text</font>.
(E.g. see demo URL.)
2.Select Print from the File menu.
3.Print to either a printer or to disk.
Actual Results:  
Fonts seem oversized.  With no settings (besides <font size=...>) that might
affect font size, printed text is rather larger than it used to be back in
the 1.2 days.  Files that used to fit nicely in a page now slop over into a
second.

Expected Results:  
Would be nice to have font sizes back the way they used to be.

Comment 1

[Kenneth Herron]

Using build 20031108 on linux. Print preview shows some text clipped on the
right, but it doesn't happen in an actual printout.

Pat, first of all, go into File->Page Setup and see if "Shrink to fit page
width" is selected. If not, try selecting it and printing again.

Second, go to Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts and see what you have for the
"display resolution" setting. The screen display resolution influences the scale
factor used for printing, and yes, there's a bug filed on that.

If you don't think either of these settings is causing your problem, please do a
print-to-file of the sample URL and attach it to this bug report. If possible,
please use version 1.6a or a recent nightly build for this; some work was done
on printing layout after 1.5 was released.

Comment 2

[Pat Tressel]

Kenneth --

Thanks for replying!

> go into File->Page Setup and see if "Shrink to fit page width" is selected.

"Shrink to fit" is on.  No difference in size with it on or off, but that's
as it should be, right? since there's only text and no big blobs with
predefined size like images.

> go to Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts and see what you have for the
> "display resolution" setting.

Resolution...uh oh.  That just might be the problem...

"Display resolution" is "System setting" ;-).  Fortunately, xdpyinfo has an
answer:

  dimensions:    1280x1024 pixels (433x347 millimeters)
  resolution:    75x75 dots per inch

Not too long ago, I and a lot of other folks with whom I share a building got
new monitors.  Not long before that, I installed Mozilla 1.4.  I don't
remember what the resolution of the old monitors was (but might be able to
find out), but it might well have changed.  Here's one test:  I can't get
back the old monitor, but the 1.2 installation I was using back then is still
present, so I'll go print the test file with it.  And...now it's coming out
larger, too.  So, I'd bet you're right, and resolution is the problem.

I just (re)checked these versions -- output is the same for all:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031029

> do a print-to-file of the sample URL and attach it to this bug report.

I'll do this anyway, in case you happen to have a different resolution,
and want to compare with what you get, to verify that it is the resolution
problem.  (The output happens to be from 1.6a.)

Thanks!

-- Pat

Comment 3

[Pat Tressel]

Attachment: Print-to-file output from xxx.html

Comment 4

[Kenneth Herron]

Printing font size being influenced by screen DPI is bug 106083.

The attached postscript doesn't seem to have any clipped text. Do you only get
that in print preview, or can you produce it in a printout (preferably using
1.6a)? There are other bugs about printouts running off the right side of the
page, but they generally involve some elements that can't be reduced enough to
fit the paper.

Comment 5

[Pat Tressel]

No, it's not clipped -- that wasn't an issue, just the font size.  I saw the
clipping in the "print preview" -- I was assuming its rendering was not
necessarily intended to be precise.  Were text lines getting clipped in bug
106083 outside of "preview"?  (I didn't notice that but might have missed it.)
Hmmm...if clipped text (not clipped images or tables) in the actual Postscript
output definitely happens when the resolution bug is at fault, then maybe this
isn't the resolution bug after all.  But let's not give up on that just yet...

Do you happen to have a different resolution (or have access to a different
resolution) than 75dpi?  If so, do you end up with a different font size from
the Postscript I just posted, when you print-to-file xxx.html?  I would try
that here, but all of us that I know of got the same monitors...  If you don't
happen to have a different resolution, I'll go on a hunt here.

Thanks!

-- Pat

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

bug 227163, bug 423525, bug 516525 sounds likely to be dupes of this

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

reporter, does this still fail when using Firefox 5 *beta* http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ or Firefox 4?

Comment 9

[Phoenix]

Closed per Whiteboard