246090 - Bad print results with HP 4M with Mozilla 1.4 on AIX

Status: NEW

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Mary Hoetzel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031008
Build Identifier: Mozilla 1.4.1

Printing from Mozilla 1.4 on AIX to an HP 4M printer results in poor quality.

Testcases:
1) http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246606.html?Open
(or go to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com, then search for "Server Farm" and select
the "Managing AIX Server Farms" link.)

Poor result: Links like HTML on the right side, buttons like Search or Buy now,
the frame around input fields, they all have a coarse, dotted look.

2) http://www.freefoto.com/, underneath Business select Agriculture, click on
the Agriculture image to enlarge it and print it.

Poor result: Print looks very coarse with poor resolution.

Result is better when selecting "color" instead of "grayscale" in the print options.

So far, this happens only on this HP 4M printer. Printing on other HP printers
or Infoprint printers works fine.
Printing the same pages from Mozilla on Windows on the same HP 4M printer shows
better results.





Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[tor]

Looking at the output, it seems like the halftone screen is set quite
coarse by default.  Waiting for results from the 4M printing one of
their generated postscript files with a test setscreen added:

  100 35 { 180 mul cos exch 180 mul cos add 2 div } setscreen

Comment 2

[tor]

Note that mozilla can't actually put this into the postscript that it
generates, since it assumes knowledge of the output device.  Just hoping
this will give us more information into what's happening on the 4M.