249290 - Delta.com Online Boarding Passes don't print properly

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Brian Zappia]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040517 Camino/0.8b
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040517 Camino/0.8b

Boarding Passes, (Generic Example attactched) look good on the screen, but not
when being printed.  The barcodes overlap the some explanitory text.  The
problem shows up in PDF Previews.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a delta.com Electronic Boarding pass(purchase required) or use the
generic example attatched
2.Print or save as PDF


Actual Results:  
Boarding pass overlaps Explainitory Text (see Attatched

Expected Results:  
Printed result should look like result on screen

Comment 1

[Brian Zappia]

Attachment: Source of problem web page (Identifying Info removed)

Comment 2

[Brian Zappia]

I'm Having trouble altering the barcodes to remove Identifying info, I'll attach
screen shots as soon as I get this resolved

Comment 3

[Brian Zappia]

Attachment: PDF Preview Illustrating Problem

Comment 4

[Brian Zappia]

Attachment: Place in folder OCIServlet Files to view as embedded

Comment 5

[Brian Zappia]

Attachment: Place in folder OCIServlet Files to view as embedded

Comment 6

[Brian Zappia]

Attachment: Place in folder OCIServlet Files to view as embedded

Comment 7

[Jesiah S]

I see this on LInux 2004090205
I noticed that most of the elements where position:absolute and that the table
shrinks when in Print preview.

Comment 8

[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 9

[Brian Zappia]

The problem as described is still evident in the test case, although I am not
confident that the test case continues to represent delta's current website.

Comment 10

[David Lowrey]

This problem still occcurs in:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

I just printed off a boarding pass and the problem still is there.

Comment 11

[Manu Sridharan]

I can confirm that boarding pass printing problems for Delta.com remain in:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090614 Shiretoko/3.5pre

However, the problem is different and (IMO) worse than the attached PDF preview; now, the rightmost 1/8 inch or so of the main boarding pass portion is simply cut off.  Printing works fine in Safari 4.0.  

I have saved the boarding pass web page, but I'm not confident that I can anonymize it sufficiently to just attach it here.  I will email it to a developer if contacted.

Comment 12

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to comment #11)
> However, the problem is different and (IMO) worse than the attached PDF
> preview; now, the rightmost 1/8 inch or so of the main boarding pass portion is
> simply cut off.

I can confirm this behavior on Linux mozilla-central, using a copy of the boarding pass emailed to me by msridhar.  However, IMHO, this isn't actually a bug in Firefox -- it's problem with the boarding pass.  See explanation below.

EXPLANATION:
 * On Linux (and I think on Mac as well), Firefox defaults to having 0.75in of page margins on the left & right sides, leaving 8.5-0.75-0.75 = 7in of printable area. (assuming 8.5in paper)

 * The Boarding pass's visible contents are exactly 7in wide.

 * So it *should* fit perfectly on standard 8.5in-wide paper... EXCEPT, the DOM inspector shows that the <body> element has "margin: 8px", adding 8px of whitespace on all sides of the page body. (This is the default for <body> in HTML)

 * So the document body has a total width of 7in + 16px, and we only have 7in of printable width. This means it won't fit on the page, unless one of the following happens:
     (a) the user increases the printable width, by reducing page margins or printing in landscape mode.
     (b) Delta.com reduces the width of their page body, by e.g. specifying "margin: 0px" on their body element
     (c) Firefox shrinks the page content to make it fit

Normally, we'd do (c) -- shrink the content -- but in this case, the overflowing content is inside of a div with the style "overflow: hidden".  So, we follow instructions and clip the overflowed content, rather than shrinking. (Note that if we did shrink the page, I think that might even be worse, because it could mess up the bar codes.  So it's good that we don't shrink-to-fit in this case.)

IMHO, the best fix for this would be (b) -- for Delta to remove the <body>'s margin:8px on their printable boarding passes, to conserve horizontal space.  The fact that their boarding passes are exactly 7in wide implies that they expect 0.75in page-margins for a perfect fit.  The <body>'s margin just messes that up.

I'm not sure there's much that Firefox would be able to do in order to "fix" this on its end -- it's faithfully printing what we've been given, AFAICT.  (though, as I stated in "(a)" above, the *user* can work around it by e.g. reducing the printed margins)

> Printing works fine in Safari 4.0.

I wonder what they do differently -- perhaps their default printed-page-margins are a bit smaller than ours?

I'm using:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090622 Minefield/3.6a1pre

Comment 13

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of clipped boarding pass

Here's a screenshot of the clipped boarding pass described in comment 11 & comment 12. (I've colored over all potentially identifying/private data, to protect msridhar's privacy)

Comment 14

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I've reported the issue to Delta using a web form in the "Contact Us" area of their web site.  I'll post an update here when I hear back from them.

Comment 15

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Still no word back from Delta... Here's the text of my report to them, for the record:
************
I'm writing to report an issue in the printable boarding passes generated  by Delta.  This issue was reported to Mozilla in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249290#c11
and was investigated in more detail in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249290#c12

Basically, Delta's boarding passes are 7in wide, and if we assume 0.75in of margins on each side, they *would* fit perfectly. However, there's an *additional* 8px of margin on the page's <body> element. (This is the default in HTML.)

If you replace <body> with <body style="margin: 0px"> in your boarding passes, this issue would be resolved.

Thanks! Feel free to contact me (or comment on the above-linked bugzilla page) if you have any questions.
************

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

do you see this issue still with version 3.6 or 4.0 beta?

Comment 17

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to comment #16)
> do you see this issue still with version 3.6 or 4.0 beta?

Per comment 12-15, this turned out to basically be a bug with the site, so it's not something that gets fixed by upgrading Firefox.

We also can't test this without having someone who's got a (recent/current) Delta Airlines boarding pass to print out.  So, I can't be certain whether it's fixed or not... but if anyone watching this bug has an upcoming Delta flight & can confirm that no text gets overlapped in the printout, that would be great.

Comment 18

[Phoenix]

Closed per Whiteboard

Comment 19

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Someone should have cleared the whiteboard when it got kicked to TE.